Movie Reviews: Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Inglourious Basterds
20 May 2009 2:29 AM, PDT

Critics attending the Cannes Film Festival are mostly expressing disappointment over Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

An unsigned review on the Hollywood Reporter website says, "The film is by no means terrible -- its running time of two hours and 32 minutes races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing."

The British trade publication Screen Daily says that it "offers considerable challenges to the attention span of mainstream audiences."

Sukhdev Sandhu concludes in the London Telegraph: "Cannes normally adores Tarantino (he won the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction), but this time? It's not so much inglorious as undistinguished."

But several critics take a machine gun to it.

Peter Bradshaw in Britain's Guardian newspaper calls it a "catastrophe" and goes on: "It isn't funny; it isn't exciting; it isn't a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn't emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that."

-IMDB News

[Brian Damage]

Eh, I'll wait to pass my own judgement.