Falling Short of Tarantino’s Own High Bar, “Inglourious” Goes Bubblegum

That’s hardly the case here. To watch “Basterds” without considering Tarantino’s implementation of enyclopedic movie knowledge makes it into a breezy, insignificant experience. After introducing Shoshanna’s plight, Tarantino shifts to the antics of the “basterds,” a group of Jewish soldiers led by the fierce Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Merrily capturing Nazis, gleefully bashing their skulls and pocketing the scalps, the basterds provide the makings of a typical revenge fantasy. Tarantino wittily cast scrawny Jewish men (“Hostel” director Eli Roth and “The Office” star B.J. Novak among them) as the movie’s principle musclemen, but that subtly ironic joke never reaches its potential.

That’s because “Basterds” isn’t really a jokefest; it’s a talk-fest. Anyone familiar with the Tarantino touch will testify that the director likes to make his characters talk, and talk, and talk - and sometimes so that it ends up absorbing the spotlight. In “Basterds,” we see the worst side-effects of this tendency, as much of the movie relies on chatter to propel it along the basic trajectory of a spy movie. Shoshanna emerges in the disguise of a non-Jewish theater owner in Paris, where she manages to infiltrate the Nazis and scheme with the basterds to take them out.

The ludicrous plot heads straight for a fiery climax that finds our heroes on a straightforward path to killing off Adolph Hitler, Joesph Goebbels and prettty much everyone else at the head of the Third Reich. In an nice bit of self-referential irony, they aim to pull it off at a movie theater while the Nazis view a screening of their own propaganda. So “Basterds” makes viewers watch a movie about killing Nazis in which Nazis watch a movie and get killed. Setting the stage for a slaughterfest, Tarantino wants to craft an old-school entertainment by way of his favorite examples, but the multiple layers prevent it from holding interest from scene to scene. “Basterds” has an arbitrary progression: As Shoshanna plans her glorious retribution, dialogue scenes go on and on, people gets shot, lavish music cues make way for interstitial moments of contemplation, and so on. Get around to it, already.

Despite the injection of content from a variety of directions, “Basterds” lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino’s other efforts, mainly because he can’t seem to tie the whole package together. Why does Samuel L. Jackson suddenly pop up on the soundtrack to narrate a fleeting background of the basterd’s evolution?  If the movie pays tribute to Westerns, how come we never get a single man-on-man confrontation, the sort of climax that magically concluded “Kill Bill”? The disconnected ingredients don’t mean that the movie lacks the ability to deliver a good time, but simply that it never rises above the sense of a juvenile cinephilic rush job, and everyone knows Tarantino can do better than that.