QUENTIN Tarantino is the kind of guy who probably wouldn’t have a fire extinguisher around the house.
Lots of film posters and memorabilia, no doubt. And some weighty volumes about cinema history and cult Mexican actors.
But no fire extinguisher. And even if he had one, he probably wouldn’t know how to use it.
He’s the kind of guy who would try putting out fire with gasoline – a guy whose incendiary movies throw caution to the wind and make everything else out there seem tame, tame, tame by comparison.
Messy, controversial, self-indulgent, unconventionally structured, his films can repel and infuriate – but ask him to turn it down a bit, calm the flames, and he’ll shrug his shoulders, gaze at his favourite posters, leaf through one of his movie books, crack open a bottle and LET IT BURN.
Tarantino’s latest wild ride blazes a typically bloody trail and turns the fire up to 11.
Inglourious Basterds is a glorious, violent, virtuoso, often hilarious war saga with the spirit of cinema itself recruited to save the world.
It is crazily conceived but expertly executed, referential but unique, brutally in-your-face but as entertaining, eye-opening and downright brave as anything else its audacious writer-director has put on screen.
Brad Pitt leads the way as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, part-Native American and chief of a Jewish-American guerrilla hit squad dropped behind enemy lines in German-occupied France to bring the Nazis as much pain and death as possible and rock the Third Reich to its core.
Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger are much more than just window dressing – or flashy marquee names – as a Parisian picture house owner and a German star actress, caught up in a Dirty-Dozen style, mass Nazi killing plan that also pulls in Aldo’s crew and stiff-upper-lip Brit Lieutenant Archie Hicox (a superb Michael Fassbender).
But it’s Christoph Waltz who steals the show as the sinister, loquacious, always-keeping-us-guessing SS Colonel Hans Landa.
This is a tough picture, an “I’m not making it easy on you” picture, that pays off with one of cinema’s most deliriously satisfying, downright crazy finales.
The maker of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill employs his usual tactics of gory murder, black humour and elaborate dialogue scenes – so if you’re not a fan already, you might be tempted to stay away.
But if you do enlist (and you really should) you might notice among the World War 2 trappings and largely European settings, and the beautifully thought out use of language, a stamp of class that is new to its maker. A certain feeling if not quite of maturity or responsibility then at least of ... progress.
His movies are about movies – a statement that can be used to sum up Tarantino’s strengths and weaknesses.
But there are moments in Inglourious where real life breaks through the surface to offer flashes of illumination that reveal an artist riffing away at the top of his game. Real life in all its bloody glory – day-to-day struggles, personal hopes, dreams, ambitions and political powerplays.
The film-making is so assured, so right-on-the money, with Robert Richardson’s (Casino, Shutter Island) photography and Sally Menke’s editing capable of taking your breath away.
And the musical cues, like much of the rest of it, are both typically Tarantino and confidently superior to anything he has done before, with an eclectic mix of Morricone, Schifrin, Bowie and Bernstein (Charles and Elmer) adding that little bit of fuel to the fire when necessary.
Inglourious is full of electrifyingly excruciating moments of mounting tension, with so many ideas, references and asides packed in you could dissect it forever and never quite get to the pure root of it.
When you find yourself caught up in a tavern basement pressure cooker face-off with an undercover former film critic trawling up references to classic German movies just to stay alive, while a drunken, drawn-out parlour game simmers away and the German actress turns out to be a spy for the British and there’s a suspicious Gestapo officer to think about – not to mention a newborn baby (called Max) – and everyone has their own agenda and you just know someone is going to give themselves away and there’s bound to be a shoot-out and you’ve been told in no uncertain terms a basement is categorically the worst place for a fire fight and STOP RIGHT THERE and ask yourself how we ended up in just this situation, based so precisely on language ...
And you’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of Tarantino’s inspired invention.