Inglorious Basterds Rated: R
Quentin Tarantino has built an illustrious career as a filmmaker by brilliantly incorporating exhilarating choreographed action sequences, avant-garde music scores and sardonic humor into his successful hits Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. Tarantino’s latest movie could be his finest cinematic achievement to date with the historical fiction WII drama, Inglorious Basterds.
Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) plays a military lieutenant who leads a brigade of Jewish soldiers, “The Basterds,” trained to brutally assassinate any Nazi soldier wearing a Swastika emblem on their military uniform. Raine’s plan to end the war by destroying the Nazi party receives an unexpected boost when he gets covert intelligence that Hitler and his brain trust are expected to attend the screening of a Nazi-inspired film.
Actress Mélanie Laurent dazzles onscreen as the beautiful, cunning Shosanna, a French Jew who escapes captivity in Nazi-occupied France to run her aunt’s movie theater. Her role becomes pivotal to the film’s explosive finale to eradicate the central core of the Nazi regime.
Christoph Waltz’s performance as Col. Hans Landa, the dim-witted yet ruthless intelligence officer, ranks among the film’s top highlights. But Tarantino’s remarkable screenplay is the unsung hero of the film by adding a splash of British-like comedic farce into the military drama.
The filmmakers depict these savage soldiers as superheroes who viciously torture the Nazi soldiers by carving a signature slogan for their brutality toward the Jewish people. While Inglorius Basterds has moments of extreme graphic violence, Tarantino and Co. provide the right touches of humor to make this worthwhile movie a spectacular experience for most moviegoers.
Grade: A-
Posted 8/26/09
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