I went into Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with mixed expectations. One the one hand, Tarantino hasn’t really hit the mark for me in years, and on other hand, I keep hoping he’s got another really good movie in him. The reviews were overall very good, so I was shooting for an entertaining experience, and would leave it at that.
Inglourious Basterds had some really great scenes that were tense and funny, and the movie was a visual feast. And Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who playI went into Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with mixed expectations. One the one hand, Tarantino hasn’t really hit the mark for me in years, and on other hand, I keep hoping he’s got another really good movie in him. The reviews were overall very good, so I was shooting for an entertaining experience, and would leave it at that.
Inglourious Basterds had some really great scenes that were tense and funny, and the movie was a visual feast. And Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who played "The Nazi Hunter," delivered an Oscar-worthy performance. If he doesn’t get a nomination, then the awards are officially useless. He will go down as one of the truly great villains in movie history. He was that good. Brad Pitt was perfectly okay, but Waltz stole the show.
As a movie, however, Basterds didn’t quite deliver. There just wasn’t enough there, there for me. It’s an idea of movie, and yet not a fully realized story. I had read early script reviews that for a two-and-a-half movie about killing Nazis, there wasn’t a whole of Nazi killing going on. Those reviews were on the mark. Too much talking, not enough doing. The talking was good, but I wanted more meat on the bones.
There’s a lot of individual pieces that really stand out in Basterds, but it didn’t quite hold together. For such a quick-witted and clever writer, Tarantino had me checking my watch a few times. It was a bit slow.
Inglourious Basterds is worth seeing, but I wouldn’t go in with only modest expectations.
Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2009/08/23 14:36
