“Inglourious Bastr*ds” is a big, bold, audacious war movie, providing World War II with a much-needed alternative ending. For once the bastr*ds get what’s coming to them.Basteds the savage fighters dropped behind Nazi lines, are an unmistakable nod to the Dirty Dozen.
There are three iconic characters in the movie: the Hero, the Nazi and the Girl. These three, played by Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent.
The story begins in Nazi-occupied France, early in the war, when the cruel, droll Nazi Col. Hans Landa(Waltz) arrives at an isolated dairy farm where he believes the farmer(Denis Menochet) is hiding Jews. He’s right, and a young woman named Shosanna(Melanie Laurent) flees into the woods. It is for this scene, and his performance throughout the movie, that Christoph Waltz deserves praises. He creates a character unlike any Nazi — indeed, anyone at all — I’ve seen in a movie: evil, sardonic, ironic, mannered, absurd.
The Hero is Brad Pitt, as Raine, leader of the Bastr*ds. Raine is played as a broad caricature of a hard-talking Southern boy who wants each of his men to bring him 100 Nazi scalps. For years, his band improbably survives in France and massacres Nazis, and can turn out in formal eveningwear at a moment’s notice.
The Girl is Shosanna, played by Laurent as a curvy siren with red lipstick and, at the film’s end, a slinky red dress. Shosanna, a Jewish teenager whose family was slaughtered by the Germans and is now living incognito in Paris where she runs a movie theater; Bridget Von Hammersmark(Diane Kruger), a famous German actress who is working as an undercover agent for the British, and Nazi Col. Hans Landa(Christoph Waltz), a heinous murderer and scheming genius who proudly refers to himself as a `Jew hunter.’
But the movie’s standout performance is Waltz’s magnetic portrayal of monstrous evil. Unlike the film’s cartoonish depictions of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, Waltz plays Landa straight and without irony, as a man so treacherous that he can make the line `Could I have another glass of your delicious milk?’ sound like a death sentence.
The movie puts you in a trance of pleasure. I haven’t even mentioned that more than half the film is subtitled or that there’s barely any traditional action in it or that Mike Myers makes a wonderfully strange but effective cameo. *Inglourious Bastr*ds* transcends the war genre to become its own kind of unique picture: A bloody blast of pure movie bliss.