Inglou­ri­ous Basterds

Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds starts with the best scene Quentin Taran­ti­no has writ­ten since Den­nis Hop­per told Christo­pher Walken he’s an egg-plant in True Romance. Whisk­ing volatile com­e­dy with pow­derkeg vio­lence, it’s as good as it gets. And it nev­er gets that good again.

Unfold­ing in Ger­man, French and Eng­lish, this ter­rif­ic open­ing scene sees the vil­lain­ous ​‘Jew Hunter’, Colonel Hans Lan­da (Christoph Waltz), mur­der a Jew­ish fam­i­ly hid­ing in a French farm. But one girl (Mélanie Lau­rent) escapes, grow­ing up to run a Paris cin­e­ma where she hatch­es a plot to kill Hitler and the Reich’s top brass when they attend a movie première.

What we have here, then, is QT glee­ful­ly har­ness­ing film’s pow­er to rewrite his­to­ry. Mean­while, Michael Fassbender’s British agent (a film crit­ic by train­ing) gets orders from an unrecog­nis­able Mike Myers to hook up with Ger­man actress-cum-spy Diane Kruger to take out Hitler him­self. Once again, it’s tough-grrls who are the real heroes in QT’s world of vio­lent men. And Kruger pro­vides the trade­mark foot fetishism.

So where, exact­ly, are the Bas­ter­ds in all this? Well, quite. After Brad Pitt’s red­neck half-Apache leader Aldo Raine demands his squad of Jew­ish-Amer­i­can sol­diers each bring him 100 Nazi scalps, they bare­ly fea­ture. After fear­some intro­duc­tions, infa­mous Nazi-killing Ger­man Til Schweiger doesn’t say a word in the film, and blan­kety-blank Eli Roth leaves you wish­ing they’d cast a prop­er actor as the infa­mous ​‘Bear Jew’. Woody Allen would’ve been good.

QT’s war opus is topped and tailed by shock­ing mas­sacres, but in-between, the vio­lence erupts only in short, bloody blasts. The dev­il is in the dia­logue. Tarantino’s best action set-pieces are all ver­bal: the farm­house scene, a tav­ern drink­ing game in which an SS offi­cer grows sus­pi­cious of Fassbender’s Ger­man accent, and, basi­cal­ly, every time Lan­da opens his mouth.

Noth­ing in the entire movie is as fun­ny, fright­en­ing or sophis­ti­cat­ed as Christoph Waltz’s unfor­get­table per­for­mance. All silken men­ace veil­ing socio­path­ic derange­ment, he’s full of tiny intri­ca­cies that don’t come from the script – whether care­ful­ly undo­ing the fas­ten­ings on a note­book, or eat­ing apple strudel (“Ah, ah! Wait for ze cream…”).

Trou­ble is, the rest of Bas­ter­ds drags on and on and on. Over the last decade, Tarantino’s movies have become less fre­quent and more indul­gent. Now it’s got to the point where he repeats long dia­logue scenes until you’re tired of hear­ing peo­ple talk. Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds ran very bag­gy at its Cannes cut of two hours and 41 min­utes. It’s no exag­ger­a­tion to say that an hour could have been hacked away like a Nazi scalp.

Taran­ti­no has been wrestling with the script for more than a decade and he still hasn’t nailed it. He even hauls in Samuel L Jack­son to inter­ject sev­er­al voiceover-inter­ludes when he runs out of ideas for how to tell the story.

By the bizarre, blaz­ing sado-mas­sacre of a finale, QT has let loose com­plete­ly: flash­es of cine-genius cur­dle with crude, crazy juve­nil­i­ty, although it doesn’t stop this being his most pure­ly enjoy­able film since Kill Bill: Vol. 1. The banana-chinned supergeek him­self obvi­ous­ly likes it – just wait for the last line.