There’s an expression in the World of Warcraft circles that applies very nicely to Inglourious Basterds, and it goes like this.  Less QQ, more pew pew.  Essentially, it boils down to: “shut up and shoot something, you whiny emo douchebag”.

And for Quentin Tarantino’s latest, Inglourious Basterds, this applies PERFECTLY.

In case you’re wondering why the spelling is such a hash, it’s because there already was a movie called “Inglorious Bastards”, that was shot back in the seventies.  Not surprisingly, Tarantino stepped in and made a movie that was almost nothing like that one but for some reason retained the title, misspelled.

The movie itself, meanwhile, focuses around several huge plots to kill Hitler and end World War II for the Allies.  One plot is government sanctioned and involves explosives.  The other is a private plot that comes about largely through happenstance.  But will the one destroy the other?

Most of the movie is spent talking.  You’ve never seen a war movie–especially a World War II movie made in the last twenty years–where so few shots are fired.  Meanwhile, characters will talk about food and movies and assorted whatnot, and most of it will be done in foreign languages, only occasionally with subtitles.  Yes, they will speak German, and they will do it without any kind of translation.

It’s hard to completely malign Inglourious Basterds, though, as the last half hour will be filled with enough Crowning Moments of Awesome to fill a small theater itself.  The final scene at the French cinema is PACKED with them.

It’s just the getting there that’s the hard part.  You’re going to suffer through interminable minutes of German parlor games and idle conversations about the movies.  Inglourious Basterds has a strange way of going from crashing boredom to crashing bombast, and once again, Tarantino shows us his primary oeuvre–to take crap from the seventies and redo it with way, WAY too much dialogue.

Added fun, however, comes in the special features when he includes a much better war movie called “Nation’s Pride”, which was a propaganda film featured IN the movie.  It’s ironic that this Nazi propaganda should be more entertaining than the movie that was built around it, because it’s both hilariously overblown (when the American general uses his radio to call Hitler himself and surrender I almost wet myself laughing–it’s so ludicrous a concept that you can’t not)  and vastly more action-packed by turns.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Inglourious Basterds, meanwhile, a five out of ten for being one part blinding boredom and one part adrenaline-mad superfilm.