We Still Don't Know Whether Inglourious Basterds is Going to Suck or Not
We're Tarantino fans for sure, but a WWII movie about Nazi-killing Jews? We're a little skeptical, and the critics aren't helping our confusion.
The reviews are starting to come in and evidence is contradictory. On the positive side, Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly gives it a B and says it's, "cinematically dazzling, to be sure, enhanced by an meticulously chosen retro soundtrack." In New York David Edelstein gushes.
Even more than his other genre mash-ups, this is a switchback journey through Tarantino's twisted inner landscape, where cinema and history, misogyny and feminism, sadism and romanticism collide and split and re-bond in bizarre new hybrids. The movie is an ungainly pastiche, yet on some wacked-out Jungian level it's all of a piece.
Oh, but his fellow Gothamite David Denby couldn't disagree more, and rails against it.
Like all the director's work after Jackie Brown, the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness-it's too shallow to be called nihilism-undermines even the best scenes.
Even the trades are split. Variety comes out in favor:
By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director.
And The Hollywood Reporter against:
Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B movies as he was with Grindhouse nor riffing on cinema as with Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films.
The only people who can come to a consensus are the British where both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph hated it.
Damn, now it looks like we're going to have to save Harvey Weinstein from bankruptcy and pay our $12.50 to try to figure out for ourselves whether or not it's good. God, critics are even worse than Nazis.