The Thousands

When a film’s opening titles feature several different typefaces, someone’s drunk on pastiche. And Quentin Tarantino is the most self-referential inebriate of all. Inglourious Basterds mangles several individually awesome ideas, adding lashings of Tarantino’s trademark tedious dialogue.

There’s a war-movie homage of both the British ‘derring-do’ flavour and the American ‘military western’ variety. The Basterds are a Jewish-American terror squad led gleefully by hillbilly Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Tarantino graphically depicts their brutality, but they’re less pivotal to the plot than the trailer suggests. Then there’s a cat-and-mouse chase between French Jew Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) and Nazi colonel Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (a tour-de-force performance from Christoph Waltz), whose chief weapons are mind games and charm.

Most powerfully, there’s a cinematic metanarrative – hell, cinema to Tarantino is like doves to John Woo. British agent Archie Hickox (Michael Fassbender) is a former film critic; German movie star Bridget von Hammersmark (Helen Kruger) is a British double agent. Shosanna’s Paris cinema hosts the climactic screening of a Goebbels-produced Nazi flick starring film buff-turned-sniper, Fredrick Zöller (Daniel Brühl). Let’s just say I felt a flutter of panic while queuing to leave.