Like his audacity or not, recent film history shows that writer/director Quentin Tarantino has often proven himself an ingenious bard, but his most recent offering INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS fails to live up to the best of his reputation.  His brash and genre-bending World War II men-on-a-mission flick has its moments, but the uneven script undercuts its ambitions to gain a decisive victory. Enhanced with likeable but confined performances by Brad Pitt and members of his Nazi-killing team, and elevated by the less flashy but winning efforts of Mélanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz, Tarantino's melange of daring espionage and bloody revenge tales is a slow burn compared to his usual pyrotechnics.  This has as many advantages as drawbacks for the film, resulting in a thematic battle on many fronts that never fully succeeds on any one of them. Scope out the stylish, sumptuous lighting and shot design you've learned to expect, but too little of Tarantino's quirky yet mellifluous wordplay causes INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS to fall short in hitting the intended target of cinematic glory.

The opening sequence of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS sums up the overall impact of the film: a dairy farmer (Denis Menochet) in Nazi-occupied France faces off against the smart and smarmy German colonel Hans Landa (a standout turn by Waltz) over hiding Jewish refugees.  This scene builds suspense slowly, a bit too slowly really which gives the audience a chance to jump ahead of the characters to the scenes ultimate, predictable denouement.  We get emotionally invested in duel of wits and deception between the two men — at Tarantino's best, it's always more about the journey than the destination — but the payoff is quite predictable because movie Nazis are just that, and by celebrating this convention, Tarantino fulfills audience expectation instead of exceeding it.  The larger point made is the recurring drawback of the story: long, often enjoyable character setups lead inevitably to foregone conclusions, and indeed a novel, unexpected approach is what we want from Tarantino but don't get.

Jumping ahead in the war a couple years, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (underutilized Brad Pitt) assembles a ruthless squad of Jewish-American soldiers hell bent to exact revenge on Adolph Hitler's anti-semitic Reich and any Swastika-clad baddie who stands in their way.  Sergeant Donowitz (Eli Roth) enjoys an all-American approach to fighting the war by crushing Nazi skulls with a baseball bat, while German deserter Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) shoots first and fast when mowing down the enemy.  By joining this wildcat mission, each man owes Raine one hundred Nazi scalps, which ironically keeps a lid on the gore for much of the film.  Audiences tend to squirm at or cheer on such vengeance — how can we not hate Nazis? — and such acts certainly separate this war drama from John Wayne or the Dirty Dozen in Quentin's unique cinematic currency.  They also diminish the intended homages to such genre classics, which works against the pop auteur's purpose.

Much like KILL BILL, the heart of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS pumps in the story beats of its female lead character Shosanna Dreyfus, played with entrancing coolness and passion by Mélanie Laurent.  Tarantino excels putting women behind the wheel of his films, and Laurent continues the trend.  Yet the very welcome multi-national cast, often speaking natively in German and French, adds a valuable European authenticity to the drama and environment, the subtitled dialogue also can't help but disarm Tarantino's mischevious, highly stylized wordplay that fans expect to hear.  A portion of his trademark verbal exhibitionism is truly lost in the translation, and while this doesn't gut the film, its omission does leave a mark.

Similarly the Basterds' storyline tends to distract from her plot without ever really gelling their common goal into one artfully blended mission against the Nazis.  Indeed, there are several touches lifted directly from the KILL BILL films — the chapter titles, flashback histories, music stings — which simply don't fit well with or serve this very different tale.  Tarantino swaps out and explores different genres through the different chapters, opening with a Sergio Leone-style homage to spaghetti westerns (which works well) and revisiting several war and foreign film styles throughout (a mixed bag).  Yet in the end, the result is a plate of separate entrees instead of blending into a rich, delicious cinematic stew as intended.

The film's best hits arise from additional strong, winning performances by Michael Fassbender as film critic-turned-soldier Archie Hicox, coupled with a fun stint by Mike Myers as his Brit commander which extends his character acting legacy as a latter day Peter Sellers.  For many, this will be American audiences' first look at Diane Kruger speaking her native German as Brigit von Hammersmark, and she appears much more comfortable and warm than she did in her two prior NATIONAL TREASURE outings.  Daniel Brühl artfully turns on a Deutsche Mark as the Nazi war hero turned movie idol, and his work with Laurent's Shosanna lifts their sequences above the rest.  Sylvester Groth oozes manic menace as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels along side Martin Wuttke's unfulfilling Adolph Hitler.  Many may not even recognize venerable Rod Taylor as the gruff, puffy Winston Churchill, but good to see him work even in an underwritten role. As noted, Waltz leads the way in his quirky, notable performance as Landa, a casting coup.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS ends up a fun if frustrating mix of high-concept hijinx, faithful tributes to several wartime film genres and dashes of purely Tarantino bloody brashness.  His film spent roughly a decade in on-and-off development and numerous script overhauls, and its sputtering history shows on screen.  The basic plot plays and sounds like an idea Quentin would have had ten years ago, polished and restructured by the contemporary writer/director, and inevitably the two Tarantinos clash more than they combine for a successor to his latest hits.  Stepping back from the deliberate, de rigueur excesses of his GRINDHOUSE installment DEATH PROOF but lacking the plot-weaving wit of KILL BILL, his resurrected war fable fires on several cylinders but never fully in sync.  Quentin the iconoclast earns points for scoring a slow-build montage prepping for the explosive Nazi film premiere with David Bowie's 1982 CAT PEOPLE single, which makes a striking counterpoint to the 1940s visuals, though it may well risk stealing from the on-screen action to remind viewers how good the song is by itself.  The numerous film-within-a-film-honoring-film references serve best when they're the least pronounced, providing a historical and dramatic context for Shosanna and her Nazi-overrun cinema theatre while occasionally devolving into less apropos movie-nerd chat.  But alas INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS enjoys a sparity of brilliant touches and a wealth of momentary indulgences which battle each other for dominance of Tarantino's overdue war epic. Still, Quentin fought the good fight to finally drop this tragi-comedy assault on the Third Reich into theaters and expect fans to report to multiplexes this weekend.