Smash Cut

Well, here ya go:

Inglorious Bastards Parts 1 & 2

But don’t get your hopes up too high, at least based on the opinion of Yours Truly.

Inglorious Bastards (or, as Quentin Tarantino mysteriously spells it in his 165-page script, Inglourious Basterds) is the award-winning director’s long-gestating World War II action epic, his homage to gritty battle movies like The Dirty Dozen, and ostensibly a remake of Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 Italian genre pic of the same name.

Hollywood rumor mills have already had a field day suggesting that Brad Pitt is being sought by Tarantino to play the lead role, Lieutenant Aldo Raine.

The titular Bastards are a guerilla squad of tough-as-nails American soldiers whose main purpose is to strike fear in the black hearts of the Nazi forces by some rather brutal tactics (I’m gonna try to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, folks). There is, in typical Q.T. fashion, an additional narrative arc, one that focuses on a French Jewish teen named Shoshanna hiding out in Paris. Both stories eventually dovetail together, as one might expect.

Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that one would also have the right to expect the screenplay to have been better written, and I’m not just talking about the constant misspellings, sloppy grammatical flubs, and oddball punctuation that pepper every page. (Perhaps this was an attempt at “style”?) Ultimately, the screenplay is so loosey-goosey and bloated that, for me, it never achieves any real momentum, unlike The Dirty Dozen. It’s jam-packed with the usual Tarantino-type monologues and fanboy cinematic references but I must admit that I wasn’t exactly wowed. Perhaps I’m just too jaded at this point.

In the end, I think the Castellari original is destined to be leaner, tougher and, quite frankly, better. Here’s the trailer for it:

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