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Inglourious Basterds, directed by Quentin Tarantino

© François Duhamel/The Weinstein Company

In this stupid and objectionable film, Brad Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a rhetorically and morally challenged Tennessee tough who, in advance of D-Day, recruits emigré German and Austrian Jews to form an irregular band of marauders to torture and murder German soldiers in occupied France. They plan to blow up Hitler and his Nazi high command at a film premiere in Paris: unfortunately, British intelligence has the same plan, as does the young, secretly Jewish woman who will welcome the Führer to her cinema. The plot is typical Tarantino, with everyone's plan of course going wrong, corpses piling up senselessly, and the plot resolving into an orgy of violence.

It's entertaining: there's no denying that. Inglorious Basterds is not dull, and many of the scenes build tension and suspense very effectively. It's also amusing at times, though not as funny as it seems to think it is. The performances, though overwhelmingly camp, are mostly pretty good (Mélanie Laurent is the best thing about it). But there are several things wrong. For a start, it's just the familiar Tarantino-world of guns, repartee and braggadocio we saw in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, with flashbacks, parallel plots intertwining and random occurrences, all reheated and transposed uncomfortably into wartime France. A pity the historical subject inspired no stylistic innovation whatever from Tarantino. Second, it's anachronistic in more ways than one, with a highly unsuitable post-fifties and partly western movie soundtrack that simply underline the silly cartoonishness of the war setting and the utterly revisionist view of the war the film gives, in which the holocaust is known of and avenged by allied troops. Third, it's self-indulgent, with tricks (text superimposed on freeze-frames, graffiti-like arrows and text superimposed on action) included just for their own sake and silly cameos by Mike Myers and, I'm sorry to say, Rod Taylor as a redundant Churchill. The British are of course upper-class idiots whose incompetence royally messes things up for the plucky Americans; the film's wartime clownishness is less funny than that of 'Allo 'Allo, which is comparison looks like the work of Sir Martin Gilbert.

But the main problem with Inglourious Basterds is the way it glorifies violence and cruelty. Just as in Pulp Fiction Tarantino invited us to sympathise with a brutal gang leader and rejoice at the prospect of extreme torture – in that case, “legitimised” by the fact that the victim had attempted a rape – here, the fact that we are dealing with “Nazis” (Germans are ignorantly and wrongly identified with Nazis throughout) impliedly legitimises the most barbaric cruelties. We see a German soldier killed by being beaten in the head with a baseball bat, and a number of men scalped – none of which is necessary of even helpful in terms of plot – and we are invited to find deliberate disfigurement funny and right. In truth the violence in this film is both shocking and sickening, and it's difficult to respect the film-maker who has chosen to present it as entertainment.

Inglorious Basterds parades the director's love of cinema, with continual reference to earlier films and directors, its “film within a film” device and its cinematic climax. But it suggests that humanity is a weakness, and that the identification with others art can inspire is a fraud. Some might argue that Tarantino is somehow criticising screen violence – that the presentation of Goebbels's film Nation's Pride is a sort of satire on “shoot-em up” cinema. I can't see it myself. All I see here is exploitation, amorality and pretext. Tarantino doesn't ask us to condemn them for it, but Aldo Raine and his men are clearly war criminals; he for his part is guilty of something of a film crime. I admired Jackie Brown, but it remains the only one of Tarantino's films I'd like to see again. If Inglorious Basterds is the kind of thing he aims at now, then I look forward to his retirement.