[Editor's Note: This review is by CL Atlanta's Curt Holman. Also check out Cooper Levey-Baker's interview with one of the stars of the original Inglorious Bastards. And for news and reviews of all the summer's biggest movies, go to CL's Movies & Television site.]
Hipster filmmaker Quentin Tarantino refuses to explain the intentional misspelling in the title of his weird World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. The titular Basterds apparently care no more for spell-check than they do the rules of war. Dashing, drawling Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) leads a squad of eight Jewish-American G.I.s into occupied France with the sole purpose of killing as many German soldiers as possible. The idea is that the “disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies” will freak out Hitler’s high command.
The Basterds aren’t just guerillas but wartime terrorists who scalp their victims and never hesitate to kill, torture or deny medical care to fight the “Natzis.” At first, Tarantino seems to present an inflammatory apologia for torture and prisoner abuse, a la 24. Inglourious Basterds arrives in theaters in the midst of an American health care debate that’s hurling Nazi metaphors and swastikas around like blunt instruments. Will town-hall meeting protesters take up the film’s symbolism and call themselves Basterds?
Maybe not, for Inglourious Basterds isn’t the movie it’s sold as, or initially seems to be. Sorting out Tarantino’s intentions for his bold, eccentric WWII fantasy is like defusing a meticulously crafted time bomb that could be either a dud or a high explosive.
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2009.