I am officially off of the Tarantino bandwagon. There is a time in every serious movie-goers life where they're forced to take off the rose-tinted glasses and examine one of their favorite filmmakers and go "hey...something's not right here!" This is that film. I was drawn in to this movie expecting a change of pace from Tarantino - a bloody war epic? Holy shit! Brad Pitt calling on his secret group of soldiers to bring him a hundred Nazi scalps? Holy shit! This is going to be the best film of the year! Well, every rose has its thorns - and this film just so happened to be one big fucking thorn.
I'm okay with Tarantino dialogue. No, really, I am. The smarmy, hipster, wise-cracking way he writes his films is enjoyable and oftentimes rather funny. I love the diner scene in Pulp Fiction just as much as the next person. I love the final exchange of Reservoir Dogs just as much as the next person. What I can't stand is him furiously masturbating himself with horrible terrible shit like Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds - thinking he can get away with overly-long (I don't mean a couI jple minutes - I mean 5-15 minutes too long) dialogue sequences that do not go anywhere, are not funny, and drag like a god damn amateur surrealist film. Is every sequence of dialogue bad? No, of course not. There are a few funny moments, and a few signature Tarantino exchanges that obviously have his stamp on them. My problem is the length. Does it really take 20 minutes of lavishly boorish dialogue to start a shootout between Americans and Nazis? No, Tarantino, it doesn't.
It is undeniably well-acted though - Brad Pitt is great as the wisecracking, southern badass Lieutenant Aldo Raine, or "Aldo the Apache". Christopher Waltz is equally great as the sinister, multilingual Hans Landa. The Mike Myers cameo is great, There are almost no faults with the casting or the performances - it's the one shining star among a black hole of shit.
However, the constant namedropping and homages to obscure foreign B-movies, while great in small doses, are way overboard here. Am I supposed to laugh at you cracking jokes about random German propagandist filmmakers from the 40s? Because it went way the fuck over my head, as it will go way over just about everyone elses. The whole damn thing feels like a really bad Sergio Leone movie, just substituting substance with over-stylization. What the fuck was the point of the typeface before you introduced Hugo Stiglitz? That's some retarded 70s disco "groovy!" type shit. How the fuck is that supposed to mesh with a psychopathic ex-Nazi during WWII? But I'm nitpicking, so I digress.
Honestly, I just wanted more scalps, more Nazis, more Basterds, more everything that wasn't an effusive enthusiasm for his own pen. It's the precise problem that plagued Death Proof, but as opposed to that, we never received our adrenaline pumping payoff. While the payoff we got was fine, and probably the best part of the whole movie, it was just a fleeting "Gad damn!" moment; absolutely nothing memorable aside from the closing scene, which was absolutely great. Everything that is Tarantino is there - the dialogue, the violence, the love of cinema - the problem is that it comes together to become one big, glacial-paced mess. I don't think Tarantinos lost it in the least, I just think he's trying to take new directions, which is respectable. Every director should try and branch out of his own niche. But the problem is that he isn't branching out of his niche - he's becoming more and more obsessed with it, and I'm considerably less excited for his future projects because of it.
5.5/10
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