“Inglorious Basterds”: Fassbender is great, but what about the guns?

Remember how you felt after seeing “Kill Bill 2” for the first time? Probably a little short-changed. Sure, the dialogue was cool as f*ck, Michael Madsen was back to his Mr. Blonde best and nobody could make a sandwich like David Carradine. So why didn’t it play right? We wanted more of “Kill Bill 1,” more bang for our buck. Like the King said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please,” Mr. Tarantino.

But of course, QT was right all along. How could he possibly top The House of Blue Leaves showdown? He confounded our expectations and did the only thing he could do under the circumstances, go small and intimate and get back to the characters; it was a “Spaghetti Soap Opera” so to speak. We loved “Kill Bill” as a whole, but the discerning half of ourselves now preferred Part 2.

“Inglourious Basterds” still has that dark-room process to go through. What sort of picture will be developed is up for speculation. As with all of Tarantino’s movies, it’s tempting to tick off the influences, but this quickly becomes a lesson in futility. After all, the sheer number of movies the director has seen is impossible to calculate. He combines them all in such a fashion that they go beyond simple homage and journey into his subconscious, a channel devoted to his favourite films – as he would have directed them.

Take the opening. Anyone who can conjure up images of “The Sound of Music”, “Come and See”, and “The Searchers” instantaneously must be doing something right. Tarantino says it’s the best thing he’s ever written, and with the aid of Christopher Waltz as SS Colonel Hans Landa he’s probably right. In the same vein as Spielberg and Cameron who are masters in escalating action, Tarantino is the master of the verbal set piece, manipulating the audience with a single sentence until we are squirming with Perrier LaPadite, a farmer harbouring a Jewish family under Landa’s beautifully crafted interrogation. Landa could easily occupy the same table as Daniel Plainview and Anton Chigurh, modern day monsters who are as deadly linguistically as they are physically.

QT touted “Inglourious Basterds” as his “Guys on a mission” movie in the mould of “The Dirty Dozen”, “Where Eagles Dare” and “The Guns of Navarone.” Enter Brad Pitt’s comical Aldo Raine and the titular Basterds, Jewish American soldiers dropped into France to strike fear into the Nazi’s by scalping everyone they capture. Tarantino dispenses with the training and catapults them straight into the action, the tail end of one of their ambushes that culminates with Donny Donowitz’s brutal use of his baseball bat. Hostel director Eli Roth, the main purveyor of the dubious genre known as torture porn, plays Donowitz as a NKOTB member on crack and is strangely effective in the role.

For all of its great moments the Basterds section is left wanting. The exhilarating use of “The Battle For Algiers” theme in the rescue of Stiglitz comes close but doesn’t quite quench our thirst. Of course it leaves us wanting more and genres are there to be subverted but is one pure action sequence too much to ask for?

And then we’re at the cinema. In fact the whole movie is about the power and myth of the celluloid experience. Key to this chapter is Shosanna Dreyfus, a Jew who escaped Landa three years earlier at the beginning of the film. Now the proprietor of a cinema, Dreyfus is the ultimate Tarantino fantasy- a dangerously beautiful movie geek who “appreciates directors.”

Shosanna’s wonderfully awkward conversation with the German war hero Private Zoller sparks an unlikely chain of events that could end the war. Zoller, the darling of the Nazi film industry, stars as himself in a propaganda extravaganza based on his exploits. The stage is set for effete movie producer Goebbels who we’re told sees himself more as “O Selznick, not Louis B Mayer” to hold a lavish premiere at Shosanna’s cinema with Hitler and his inner circle all in attendance and Landa in charge of security.

Such a tempting target is not to be sniffed at and Tarantino, like Shosanna, thinks big. Why settle for B-movie Nazis when you have a chance at wiping out the A-list? He doesn’t let historical accuracy hamper him and allows himself and Shosanna the opportunity to kill the Third Reich’s all-star cast. Tarantino’s decision to paint Goebbels and Hitler as cartoon villains is controversial, but is it any different from Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator” or even Bugs Bunny in “Herr Meets Hare”?

While Shosanna plans to blow up the Nazis by setting fire to her highly flammable 35mm film, Lt. Archie Hicox, soldier, film critic and fluent German speaker, is briefed by General Fenech (a Mike Myers cameo, just managing not to slip into Austin Powers mode). Hicox, played by the magnificent Michael Fassbender, looks unnervingly like a young Daniel Day Lewis as he delivers a short synopsis of the Nazi film industry. Impressed Fenech offers him the chance to “Blow up the basket” – Shosanna’s cinema – the General blissfully unaware o the other assassination plot.

Hicox, aided by the Basterds disguised as Nazis, rendezvous with the German film star and double agent Bridget Von Hammersmark in a cellar bar crowded with Nazis. Bridget will get Hicox inside the premiere as her guest. Tarantino’s writing now comes into its own. The scene builds and builds – in a brilliant nod to “Where Eagles Dare” – until a stunning reveal throws the whole dynamic off kilter and places the whole mission in jeopardy. Fassbender is imperious throughout, the camera hangs on his every word like a doe-eyed teenager.

The extended climax is full of surprises and neat twists, but Tarantino’s great strength here is that he isn’t overly sentimental when it comes to his characters. Part of the sequence plays like the set up of The House of Blue Leaves set piece in “Kill Bill 1” as the various story threads come together. Again, the nature of cinema and truth is questioned.

Tarantino toys with our expectations of the genre and the notion of the “Good German.” Zoller may have killed hundreds of allied soldiers but wasn’t he just following orders? Even as Shosanna counts down to her annihilation of the Nazi hierarchy her feelings toward Zoller are fatally mixed as she blurs his screen persona with his real character. The end result of it all is akin to a “Twilight Zone” episode.

At the very least, “Inglourious Basterds” demands a second viewing. Its multi-faceted mise-en-scene will continue to grow and shift as the years pass and as the majority of its audience catch up with the films that influenced it. New pleasures will undoubtedly reveal themselves, new lines will be quoted, and if nothing else, it should lay the ghost to rest of that supremely indulgent and selfish Tarantino exercise known as“Death Proof.”

A summer with Tarantino in it is better than one without, but next time, QT, can we have some more gunplay please?