Inglourious Basterds Blu-ray Review

By Chris Cox , Hollywood.com Staff | Monday, December 14, 2009

Seventeen years after his auspicious directorial debut with 1992‘s Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino finally released the film he’d spent more than a decade writing and talking about, his “bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission film,” Inglourious Basterds. The story only partially follows the titular group, a nazi killing group of soldiers under special orders to spread fear through the Third Reich by their brutal method of intimidation, collecting scalps. Much more is seen of Christoph Waltz as “The Jew Hunter” Hans Landa, a Nazi so affable in his demeanor that it makes his psychopathic nature that much more terrifying. Waltz’s evil detective (which, by the way, deserves a Best Actor Oscar nomination and will likely get one) is assigned to protect the Nazi high command as the security advisor for a screening of Nation’s Pride, a propaganda film that Jew-in-hiding Shosanna is forced to play at her theater in Paris for an audience of dignitaries. Two plots come together in an exciting and explosive ending that only a true fan of cinema could enjoy on the level that it’s clear Quentin Tarantino did in putting it all together.

Quentin has claimed that Inglourious Basterds is the best thing he’s ever written. Maybe it is, from Quentin’s point of view. Certainly, every last scene in the film is oh-so-meticulously and -artfully constructed, but sometimes it feels more like a collection of long scenes from other movies than a continuous tale. Like in Tarantino’s previous works, Basterds divides itself up into chapters, often switching the tone as drastically as it does the story. Even though all these differently shaped pieces fit together at the end, the gap between silly camp (Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine and his fellow Basterds are an over-the-top and ridiculously accented hoot) and darkly serious (Mélanie Laurent as the grim Shosanna Dreyfus seeking a mass revenge for her family’s murder) is wider than in his previous works and is almost impassable if one is to take his film as seriously as it sometimes seems he wants us too. It’s oddly a testament to Quentin’s own capabilities as a filmmaker that the powerful stuff here works so well that the film’s goofier side can be irritating....or, depending on the viewer, vice versa.

Here again is the crux: It’s a Quentin Tarantino film. I’m not saying he gets a free ride; I’m saying that have to look at what he’s made on his terms. What he wants us to do is have fun and Basterds is surely that. A different director would have tried to come up with an ending that would have satisfied the needs of the story and not deviated so dramatically from history. Tarantino’s answer is one so quintessentially Tarantino that you either have to choose to laugh along with him or throw the entire thing out the window. You can almost hear Quentin and friends laughing uproariously about at every stage of development, and that's what he’s here for and what his goal as a filmmaker has always been -- going to the theater to have a good time. Taken purely on that level, it’s difficult to argue with him.

With all that being said, I’d have had a lot more fun if at least 30 minutes of this 152-minute opus had been trimmed. There’s a lot of fat that might be tasty but clogs up the pace, notably the excessively long basement bar scene. Nothing would have been taken away from the film by it being reduced to a considerably smaller sequence or even just a small bit of exposition illustrated by one of Quentin’s beloved cut-away scenes. It’s the only time in the film that Quentin’s own love of cinema betrays him, preventing him from deleting a sequence that should have gone in some other film.

The Blu-ray release looks and sounds especially glorious. No surprise that a cinephile like Quentin would insist on a perfect transfer, and it really is. What is always a surprise to me is that once again there’s no commentary track. Only a 30-minute roundtable discussion between Pitt, Tarantino and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell is here to illustrate his feelings, which is nowhere near enough for this film, as personal as it clearly is. That said, there’s lots of other good stuff here, like an examination of all the cinema posters seen in the film and how they reflect the period of time; a look at the Italian B-movie Inglorious Bastards that inspired this one (but is not a remake) enough that Quentin brought in the actor and director from it to play bit parts; lots of gags; and more. Not as good is a jokey look at the making of the fake propaganda film Nation’s Pride, where Eli Roth gets a chance to irritate us with another bad accent and three extended scenes, not because the scenes themselves are bad but because it’s clear there were a lot of other scenes shot that weren’t included here. Indeed, Tarantino himself discusses one such sequence in his roundtable, saying he wouldn’t let it in the DVD release because he didn’t want audiences to not be able to imagine their own story.

Inglourious Basterds never becomes the Tarantino Dirty Dozen it was sold as. It’s best described as a spaghetti war film, also known as ‘macaroni combat’ (seriously), and makes for exactly the type of tale that only Quentin can tell and get away with in this day and age. Whether one can enjoy as much as he does his flawed but funny tribute to the history of such films is a decision that should take some deliberation but is certainly worth the effort to do so. This isn’t the vital filmmaking some would have you believe, and it certainly isn’t the best film Quentin has made, but it’s not something you want to miss, either.

Buy It, Rent It or Forget It? - Rent It!
Release Date: December 15th, 2009

Both the Two-Disc Special Edition and Blu-ray™ also come with:
• Roundtable Discussion with Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt and film historian/critic Elvis Mitchell
• The Making of Nation’s Pride
• The Original Inglorious Bastards - a salute to the original 1978 film
• A Conversation with veteran actor Rod Taylor
• Rod Taylor on Victoria Bitters, the Australian beer
• Quentin Tarantino’s Camera Angel
• Hi Sallys – Gag Reel
• Film Poster Gallery Tour with Elvis Mitchell
• Inglourious Basterds Poster Gallery
• Digital Copy of Inglourious Basterds