Military Movies - Military Times

War of words

As anyone who routinely haunts the octoplex is aware, movie trailers have become a con game in which studios pluck the juiciest moments from a film — often its only juicy moments — to create a head-spinning mash-up that more often than not bears little resemblance to the film.

But rarely has this increasingly slick bait-and-switch been pushed to the audacious extremes of “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s highly anticipated World War II fairy tale.

The trailer makes the film look like “Reservoir Dogs” meets “The Dirty Dozen.” I know — who wouldn’t drool over that, right?

But this overlong (153 minutes) pseudo-epic turns out to be 15 minutes of action and 138 minutes of static scenes in which actors simply yak at each other.

That’s not all — with a mix of German, American, Italian and French characters, much of the movie is subtitled. And it gets worse: In some scenes, multiple characters speak a combination of languages, so Character A speaks and then Character B translates for Character C — which too often adds up to Zzzzzzzz.

It’s not that the dialogue is bad; quite the opposite. This has always been a Tarantino strong point, and here it’s delivered by talented actors. But more than two hours of dialogue, even good dialogue, is a letdown — doubly so when the movie is being sold as something much different.

It starts promisingly. The film is cut into five chapters, the first set early in the war and titled “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France” — a clear homage to the late, great Sergio Leone, as is the scene that follows, which evokes one of Lee Van Cleef’s best scenes in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

The erudite, slightly foppish and altogether deadly SS Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at the rustic house of a French farmer (Denis Menochet) to announce he’s rounding up the last few Jews in the district.

After the silky Landa toys with the farmer at some length, it is revealed that a family of Jews is hiding in the basement. Landa’s troops massacre them, but one, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), manages to escape.

The next chapter introduces Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a half-Apache Tennessee mountain man with a prominent rope burn on his neck that’s never explained.

Raine commands the Inglourious Basterds, eight Jewish-American troops who have been running riot behind enemy lines to fulfill their boss’s edict that each bring him “a hundred Nat-zee scalps taken from the heads of a hundred dead Nat-zees.”

“We ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ bidness,” Raine drawls. “We’re in the Nat-zee-killin’ bidness. And bidness is a-boomin’!”

In short order, the film jumps forward to 1944. Shosanna is now the proprietor of a family-owned movie theater in occupied Paris and the recipient of unwelcome advances from young, handsome Nazi war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl).

Zoller, a sniper known as “the German Sgt. York” for supposedly killing 300 Allied troops over three days from the bell tower of a church, is starring in a film about his exploits called “Nation’s Pride,” the latest pet project of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth).

Zoller persuades Goebbels to hold the premiere at Shosanna’s theater, which brings Landa back on the scene as chief of security for the event. When word comes that Der Füerher himself will attend, Shosanna hatches a plot to avenge her family by trapping the Nazi elite in her theater and burning it down.

Meanwhile, the Basterds join up with British Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) in their own plan to storm the premiere, with their way in provided by a beautiful double agent, famous German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

It all sounds can’t-miss, doesn’t it? But it’s just one yammering scene after another, with too-few and too-brief moments of action coming at too-lengthy intervals.

As usual, Tarantino unleashes his overstuffed arsenal of B-movie visual tricks and, as usual, some leave you scratching your head in puzzlement.

In one scene of — what else? — extended dialogue, he jerks the camera back and forth among three characters, focusing solely on the one speaking. Other than giving viewers a case of phantom whiplash, what’s the point?

Self-indulgence is a given in a Quentin Tarantino film. But you can usually overlook that when he delivers the goods. Here, it’s almost all self-indulgence.

The last thing I expected from a QT World War II flick was his version of a slow-moving, artsy-fartsy foreign film with subtitles.

I got to see “Inglourious Basterds” for free — and I still felt ripped off.

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Rated R for violence, language and brief sexuality. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.