Inglorious Basterds takes place sorta-kinda in World War 2, but this is a World War 2 where the US didn't follow any war crimes guidelines, and Hitler was killed in a grand allied plot rather than shooting himself in a ditch. Also, lots of cursing and blood and obviously fake gore.

I guess Tarantino has this whole 70s-retro thing he does. Pulp Fiction looks 20 years older than it actually is. That's cool, I guess. It helps with the style of that particular movie. However, he takes it in another direction with Basterds. The Basterds "scalp" any Nazis they kill, because Brad Pitt is apparently 1/4 Native American. Not only is this insulting to any Native Americans watching the film, but the "scalping" is always shown in close-up, and it's obviously plastic and rubber heads. The knives slice cleanly through scalp in perfect semi-circles, leaving a quarter inch of bare skin between the bloody "skull" and the remainder of the victim's hair.

When I saw the trailer, I thought this movie would be an overly violent, historically inaccurate tale of the brave wildeness adventures of a fictional team of US commandos. Unfortunately the scene from the trailer where they hit the dude with the baseball bat is the ONLY scene involving the Basterds outside at all. The rest of the movie consists of a very long Seinfeldian lead-up to a complex triple-plot to kill Hitler. Despite the fact that each plot fails in some way, they all...succeed...I guess. Hitler is killed, then his body is shot at close range by an entire machine gun clip (which we see in a very HD close-up) and then blown to bits. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt is un-re-captured, and eventually closes out the movie by using his bowie knife to scrape a guy's forehead off in another extreme close-up that only serves to prove the "forehead" is play-doh with Hawaiian Punch behind it.

There are some good points, but they're minor. Pitt's character is eventually roped into pretending he's an Italian filmmaker, and his horrible high school level Italian with a thick Virginia accent is the highlight of the film. It's also funny to see the standards stereotypes of "Americans are better at warring." A German officer, upon surrender, turns over his knife. It's a narrow 6 inch blade. 5 seconds later, we see Pitt's knife: a 3 inch wide, 14 inch long bowie knife, larger even than Crocodile Dundee's. Similar subconscious "American penises are bigger than Nazi penises" scenes crop up as you watch the film, for everything from sidearms to rocket launchers.

So yeah, Hitler was a bad dude, it's fun to fantasize about what would have happened if he was a complete moron and put himself at enormous risk halfway through the war. But he was NOT a complete moron, as evidenced by him nearly taking over the world, so the movie makes little sense, if any.

Oh, as a final "wtf," Mike Myers is in the movie. Yes, Mike "Austin Powers" Myers. He plays a very stiff British officer who shares a 2,000 square foot office with Winston Churchill, a grand piano, and absolutely no other furniture. He delivers his lines in the exact same voice as "Austin Powers trying to convince someone he's serious," and it ruins the entire scene (which SHOULD have been quite important). The entire movie is like that, it's like they set out to make a movie that was a nod to terrible 70s action movies, the fantasies of scraping swastikas into Nazis' faces, and how much we all still hate Hitler. Pass.