Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” is undoubtedly the talk of the town today with every critic firing reviews out left, right and center. Here are a few more thoughts of critics around the interweb:
Jeffrey Wells found the film to be a “fairly engaging Quentin chit-chat personality film in World War II dress-up” but ultimately felt it was “probably too talky to lure the knuckle-draggers” as the “chat really does seem to weigh things down in the middle section.” While he thought the film had “no emotional currents, no sense of realism and no characters you’re allowed to really and truly enjoy and care about,” he did note that “the two best performances are given by Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa — a great malicious Nazi — and Melanie Laurent as Shoshanna Dreyfus, a French farm girl who escapes Landa’s grasp and winds up running a Parisian cinema.”
Variety’s Todd McCarthy wrote that the film “only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through” but once doing so was “a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that’s new for the director.” McCarthy agrees with Wells that “the best characters are non-Yanks, all of whom speak their own languages” but added that “[Michael] Fassbender cuts a dashing figure, speaks with a wonderfully clipped accent and rather resembles Daniel Day-Lewis.” He also felt that the film “gets too carried away with over-elaborated dialogue scenes” and that “some scenes feel overly attenuated.”
Time Magazine called for the film “to be declared a misfire” claiming that “on the basis of sheer entertainment value, [‘Basterds’] can’t match the two hours Tarantino spent onstage in Cannes last year talking movies with French critic Michel Ciment.” The magazine noted that “[Brad] Pitt all but disappears into his mountaineer accent and laconic sadism [while] the other Basterds are mere war-film window dressing” although Waltz, in his role as Col. Hans Landa, “could take Cannes’ Best Actor prize on Sunday night.” They felt that “for all his notoriety as a director of complexly choreographed action, gore, car and dance sequences, what [Tarantino] really likes is to let people – meaning himself, as the screenwriter – talk.”
The Telegraph’s Sukhdev Sandhu thinks Tarantino “should have wielded a cleaver to whole sections of this 154-minute non-epic” as “there is far too much yakking, some of it thickly accented and hard to follow, most of it without the rhythmic zing of his best work.” He concluded that the film is “not so much inglorious as undistinguished.”
IFC’s Allison Willmore feels that the film is “flat-out tiresome, and from a commercial perspective, incredibly dicey.” She notes that the film was “an ‘assembling the crew’ film that doesn’t allow its crew to hang out or do much” and explains that “one of the reasons [‘Basterds’] is so dialogue-laden is that at least half the scenes are there just to introduce and show off a character.” Willmore also writes that “no matter how clever they may get, they end up defeated by their own pace and their writer’s inability to let anything go” and that “the film’s two hours and 40 minutes long, and could be shorn of an hour just by picking up the tempo.”
ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge wrote that the “intermittently-inspired World War II epic which illustrates both Quentin Tarantino’s brilliance and his tendency towards indulgence.” Goodbridge noted that “no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time” and, subsequently, “the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing.” Again, Tarantino is noted as he “shows off his ear for a witty back-and-forth or monologue with flamboyant frequency, often to the detriment of dramatic momentum.” Samuel L. Jackson’s role in the film, which we had questioned, is confirmed by Goodridge though as he points out that “Tarantino regular Samuel L Jackson contributes a jarring voiceover midway through.”
The Times’ Ben Hoyle calls the film “a violent, funny love letter to cinema filmed in four languages.”
