For a while now – actually, for over 10 years – I’ve been responding to inexcusable and bluntly peculiar notions that Mr Quentin Tarantino is: ‘like… the best director in da world!11′ with a swift and graceful roundhouse kick to the face.
Chris Waltz and his pipe.
The trailer, which saw Brad Pitt gurn his way through a molasses-thick Southern drawl – preaching so delectably about the restorative nature of scalping while the camera cuts to scenes of people screaming, people firing machine guns, people hitting other people in the face with baseball bats, and Hitler in a long, flowing Nazi cape doesn’t really capture the film at all. This, as the advertisements will proudly boast, is a Tarantino film, so the violence comes in (admittedly strong) waves, and the rest of the (slightly indulgent) 153 min running time is left to some serious scene chewing by its excellent cast.
It’s not Pitt, either, who steals the film – it’s Christopher Waltz, who will be a newcomer to the majority of English speaking audiences. He’s a force of nature, whose intelligence and psychotic temperament is bettered only by the size of his pipe. Waltz, who plays ‘The Jew Catcher’, stretches the tension to ‘eeeeking’ point in every scene. Particularly that in the opening, which is one of the director’s best.
There are other notable performances by Melanie Laurent, Daniel Bruhl, Diane Kruger, and Michael Fassbender, but what is most pleasing is the fact that, although Quentin Tarantino still can’t resist turning cinematic conventions around for his-own egotistic uber-geek delight, the story actually benefits from his f***ing around. The strangeness and peculiarity of selecting scores from other films, throwing in random use of fonts, props and flashbacks… it all keeps the film comfortably on the other side of reality, allowing the audience to enjoy the great dialogue and extreme justice all the more.
