DIRECTOR: Quentin TarantinoSTARRING: Brad Pitt, Christopher Waltz, Daniel Bruhl, Eli Roth, Melanie Laurent, Til Schweiger.
REVIEW: As the credits of the film started to appear, I sat on my seat, spell-bound. And then, the applaud. The premiere of Inglourious Basterds ended with a standing ovation. A bubble of anticipation that had been building up inside me for the past four months, suddenly eased and snapped.
I had been through a top-class cinematic experience. After watching the film, I am compelled to proclaim that Quentin Tarantino still is the most innovative and entertaining director that Hollywood has to offer. Tarantino plays out his cards with sheer brilliance, and lo, we have a masterpiece on our hands! The ingenuity and passion with which the maestro delivers the film is truly remarkable. This time around, he has nailed it. The film is rock-steady enough to shut out the mouths of even the harshest of the critics. In each and every aspect of film-making, Inglourious... is the best QT movie ever. It has enough potential to be his career-defining film.
The film opens with the young Jewish girl Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), narrowly evading massacre by German high command Hans Landa (Chris Waltz), who is know as the 'Jew Hunter' for his notorious inflictions on the Jews residing in France. In the meanwhile, a group of American-Jewish soldiers, led by the heavily accented Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), plans to drop into hostile Nazi territory and give them a taste of their own medicine by executing them on a massive scale.
Calling themselves the 'Inglourious Basterds', the group come across a plan to eliminate all the top personnel of the Nazi regime (including Hitler), all of whom would be attending a movie premiere in a Parisian theater. Coincidentally, the theater owner is none other than Shoshanna, who lives in Paris under a false identity, an has her own plans to extricate revenge for the slaughter of her family by the Nazis.
The majority of the German characters are stereotyped as bumbling idiots throughout the film, something I thoroughly enjoyed watching. However, the characterization of the sadistic 'Jew Hunter' Hans Landa has been cleverly carved out by Tarantino, and the execution by the actor Christopher Waltz is even better. This truly is one of the greatest character to come out of Tarantino's exquisitely imaginative mind.
The movie is an assortments of film styles, genres and sub-genres that Quentin pays homage to. Its not just a full-blown, mindless war flick. It has elements of a spaghetti-western too, something which Tarantino now specializes in. It also features a very spell-binding Mexican standoff, which is one of the highlights of the film. Though it is just pure entertainment, the dialogue is very rich and deeply drawn out. Its not just a screenplay: its a meticulous and detailed character thesis.
The director comes up with various interesting scenarios and puts the completely made-up characters into those settings. From then on, the characters act on their own, and QT just nudges them by suddenly changing the serene setting to a violent one, or vice-versa. Then we get to see a completely new dimension of the character, and this why Inglourious Basterds works. In short, this guy is a mobile warehouse of wildly imaginative ideas stashed together.
All the actors have done a fairly good job, Waltz being an exception. That is because his portrayal of the ruthless Hans Landa is out of this world. Brad Pitt and Eli Roth as the basterds are equally entertaining to watch.
Though some critics would be jumping to point out that the German characters, as shown in the film, are one-dimentional and are shown in a very misleading light, my answer to them would be that that's how its meant to be. The story is not shown from the Nazi view-point, it simply isn't their story. The story is about the Basterds. Had the characters of 'ze Germans' been detailed, then the story would have been completely different. All the German notoriety and cleverness has been compressed on the character of Hans Landa, who acts as a sort of representative of the whole German regime.
On the whole, this is audacious film-making at its best. Inglourious Basterds is a no-holds barred film which does not repent its on-screen cruelty. It is a gore-fest with a pinch of Black comedy to help keep tension at bay. It hits you smack on your face, and if you are not prepared, you might find yourself gaping at the sudden shift of mood. Watch it without further ado!
RATING: 4.5 out of 5 for film-making par excellence. Sheer beauty....
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