Another Quentin Tarantino guilty pleasure, Inglourious Basterds is a peculiar mix of suspense with a pace that is at times maddeningly slow. Each act of the movie is almost a standalone short. String them together, though, and at 2 hours and 40 minutes, the whole was too long for me. And I don’t understand the misspelling of the title. But, knowing that Tarantino probably did not feel constrained by history when making a World War II movie, there is real tension and suspense about the plot of an undercover band of Nazi-slaughtering Americans led by Brad Pitt. On the other side, Christoph Waltz plays Hans Landa, an SS officer adept at sniffing out the plots of the Americans and the French resistance. Pitt is all hokum and Tennessee slang, while the polyglot Landa is pure refinement. The contrast ends there, though, as each is equally brutal in dealing with the enemy. With brutal violence typical of a Tarantino film, this movie is not for everyone, but I certainly found it more satisfying than Kill Bill.
Perhaps the misspelling was to distinguish this movie from “The Inglorious Bastards”, a 1978 film starring the immortal Bo Svenson and Fred “the Hammer” Williamson (thanks, IMDB).