So tonight me and my friends decided to go see a movie. We were tossed up between two movies: Inglorious Bastards, which I hadn't seen yet, and District 9, which judging from my review, I really liked. We decided on Inglorious Bastards. Let's just say I wish I saw District 9 again.
Inglorious Bastards is definitely not a bad movie in the traditional sense of a bad movie. The characters are interesting, the actors are great, and the idea definitely has solid background. But the style of the movie and scenes are just so all over the place that what could've been a great idea is just made into a boring mess of a movie.
By far the biggest problem with this movie is that it has a SEVERE case of identity crisis. Before I walked into the theater, I was expecting a comedy. I sat down expecting to laugh, and was completely thrown off by the horribly tragic first scene, in which a tiny little farmhouse in Nazi-occupied France is visited by Nazi officers because of suspicions of a family of Jews hiding out there. It's not that the scene isn't well done--the dialogue and acting are all spot on, and it's actually builds up quite a lot of tension. It's just the furthest thing from funny; not in one of those "all the jokes are falling flat" type of way, but because this scene is supposed to be completely serious. Then the next scene takes us to Brad Pitt making a bunch of dumb jokes as Lt. Aldo Raine, who is leading a group of vigilante American officers in France who are out to kill and scalp the Nazis. Then it goes back to a more serious drama about one of the girls who escaped the Nazi attack in the first scene and is trying to rebuild her life as a French citizen. The movie just can't decide what it wants to be. There are way too many scenes when I was trying to figure out if I should be laughing or not. Some scenes are dead serious, some are totally comedic, and some are a poor hybrid of both. I just didn't know what to make of it.
"Inglorious Bastards" is kind of a misleading title, because we only actually see the Inglorious Bastards and their associates for less than half the movie. There are two major plot lines that run throughout the movie and meet at the end. The first is about Lt. Raine and his group of Inglorious Bastards bent on the killing and scalping of Nazis. The other is a drama about the girl who escaped in the first scene, who has just been put in charge of premiering a new Nazi propaganda film at her cinema. But this isn't one of those movies that cuts back and forth between the two story lines. Instead, it gives us these two stories in huge chunks. It'll spend a half hour or so on one story, then a half hour or so on the other, and it goes back and forth until they eventually meet at the end. However, the movie focuses so much on one story that you almost completely forget that the other even exists until it comes back to it again. Also, both stories are filled with so many ridiculously boring dialogue scenes that just feel completely unnecessary or dragged out far beyond what they need to be. And like I said, it's not that the characters aren't interesting, it's just that there are so many scenes that just feel so unneeded.
However, the final scene (the last 20 or so minutes of the film) is so wonderfully paced and plotted that you almost forget about the messy bore that was the rest of the movie. ALMOST. The last scene really leaves you wishing that the entire movie was like this. Unlike the rest of the movie, the last scene is great at mixing both humor, seriousness, and suspense. I almost wish that I had just walked into the movie at the beginning of this scene--I would've liked the movie much more. As it stands though, a great ending cannot make up for the fact that the rest of the movie was so poorly paced and edited.
In the end, Inglorious Bastards is a two and a half hour mishmash of a movie that easily could've been condensed into an hour and a half or shorter movie that was either a comedy or a serious drama loosely based on historical events. You just can't go from scenes showing Nazis graphically butchering Jews to Brad Pitt acting like an idiot. It's a shame too, because the very interesting characters and great acting in the movie had so much potential.
I give it 2/5 stars.
And if you want to see a good movie about the events of World War II that can blend humor and seriousness, look no further than the 1997 movie "Life Is Beautiful".
