Christoph Waltz to Brad Pitt (left): "Yeah, now who's the pretty one?"

Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Mélanie Laurent, Daniel Brühl
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter: Quentin Tarantino

“This is your masterpiece,” announces a very well-known critic in front of Quentin Tarantino and fifty-odd journalists. It’s July and we’re sitting in a sweaty room in west London,with the man himself. Man of the hour. We’ve all just seen his latest opus, but once we leave this room we’re not allowed to talk about it. Until now.

Set in 1940s France, then occupied by Nazis, Inglourious Basterds is the fictional story of a group of Jewish freedom fighters, led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), who target and scalp (quite literally) Nazis, always leaving one alive to try and spread fear among his compadres. At the same time, Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent), having just witnessed the execution of her family at the hands of SS Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz) – otherwise known as “The Jew Hunter”, is out for revenge against the Nazis involved in their deaths. Her plans collide with that of the Basterds as the cinema she runs is chosen to premiere a new propaganda film and, once it is determined that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi soldiers that killed her family plan to attend, it becomes the number one target for both parties and the motto they have in common: kill, or be killed.

But to start at the beginning of this two and a half hour long piece (really, could we expect anything less from Tarantino?). The film opens with a nail-bitingly tense thirty minute scene in which Shoshanna’s family hide under the floorboards of a local French farmer’s house. The audience is gripped, wondering whether visitor Colonel Hans Landa, who sits directly above them, will find and kill the fugitives. This entire scene is shot so simply, the nerves and sweat on the French farmer’s face so clear, that everything else is forgotten, even the length of it, the question of when and how Brad Pitt will swing into shot is made irrelevant by its immediate effect on the viewer; it doesn’t matter what side, if any, we’re on, we just HAVE TO KNOW what happens to the family.
As already indicated, the family are shot to pieces. To illustrate what kind of sick man Hans Landa is, he lets Shosanna go free, delighted by her terror and imminent grief. Little did he know it could be the biggest mistake of his life.

Fast forward to a few years later and Shosanna, still stricken with sadness, busies herself running a local cinema. It is there she meets Frederick Zollander (Brühl), a film star who, in a bid to impress her, convinces the makers of his latest film to premiere it at Shosanna’s picture house. When Shosanna, and the Basterds, get wind that the German High Command – including the Führer himself – will be in attendance, “Operation Kino” is in full swing, with surprising, comedic and devastating results.

Laurent: "I'm going to kill you all, mwahaha!"

Pitt is scripted all the witty backlash, but he is completely overshadowed by performances from lesser-known actors including Laurent and, particularly, Christoph Waltz. Quentin said in an interview that if he couldn’t find the right person to play Hans Landa he would call the whole thing off and it’s easy to see why – you need someone capable of convincing an audience that there are such a pig, so devastatingly inhumane and evil that killing people is nothing but a a simple daily task. Waltz not only pulls this off but also adds more dimension to the role, his character’s slick behaviour and sickening all-too-evident pleasure in the torture he brings to his enemies is both saddening and scary.

In true Tarantino style the film does run away with itself at times and the plot is often confusing and hard to keep up with, chopping and changing between the two main strands of storyline, and that’s before it even introduces Diane Kruger’s character as the actress and undercover agent Bridget von Hammersmark, who later works with the Basterds in their plot to kill Hitler. The rest of the Basterds, particularly Eli Roth and Michael Fassbender, despite being more than capable of performing well above their underachieving roles, barely get a line in anywhere.

People will also argue that it’s too long, but it couldn’t have been cut. Quentin made sure that every second on screen is a second needed for the story to make sense and retain attention. That it does do, but the enthusiasm with which the legendary director has treated this film has blind sighted him, sometimes movies don’t need to be crammed full of complex content to stand the test of time. It is understandable, however, that he has done this, given that his more recent efforts have not been as well received as his classics. It is forgiveable, in fact, simply because of his excellent casting, the consistently snappy and intelligent dialogue (which subtly references more war films than we’d even heard of) and a very, very intense climactic and sickening pleasing finish.

So, is it his best film? No. But it’s second to one that probably can’t be bettered in this lifetime. And sometimes even the most iconic directors have to realise the game’s no fun if all you’re doing is trying to beat yourself.

Inglourious Basterds is in cinemas on 21st August via Universal Pictures

By Cathy Reay