A film review of Inglourious Basterds and the “Killin Nazis business”

And the “Killin Nazis” business in this movie is good.

Overlooking some basic details including that the movie’s plot has no historical or other basis in fact, or that no organized Jewish Nazi hit squad existed, the movie’s premise serves as an ornamentation of vengeance and revenge.

Shot with a lingering affection for the French countryside, and other locales as its backdrop, the Director Quentin Tarantino, makes an attempt at easing the French shame of their collaboration with the Nazis–by including a story about a French farmer hiding Jews in his farm house; and from that scene, the lone survivor becomes a heroine by literally burning down a cinema where the entire Nazi hierarchy has gathered to celebrate a movie about one of its own–Fredrick Zoller played by Daniel Bruhl–is both the protagonist and actor of the film within the film, where he successfully kills many enemies of the Third Reich.

Inglourious Basterds” is based upon a 1978 Enzo Castellari World War II story. “Aldo the Apache” Raine, is played by the wily and effervescent Brad Pitt. His first order of duty is to order his eight Jewish-American soldiers to deliver the scalps of 100 dead Nazis apiece—or as in Aldo’s world; they owe him 100 “debits.”

The movie unfolds over five individual chapters each with its own child like titles. Chilling and unforgiving it opens with the story of "Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France." The title’s comic-tragic combination although meant as absurdity, sets the tone of the savage cruelty and bestial nature of the Nazis.

Running at approximately two and a half hours, there is no shortage of gore and killing. Although one would like to imagine a “Jewish wet dream” of revenge—the movie serves as a reminder of good and evil which history can never change.

In the closing scene where the “Jew Hunter” played by Christoph Waltz as the efficient Nazi Col. Hans Landa, makes a deal with Pitt’s OSS bosses, never has a movie’s words rang more true than with Aldo Raine’s observation that if a “Deal is too good to be true,” well it probably is.

Such is the world he and the other characters in the movie live in; albeit one in which fate has already played its hand.

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