I get that it's not meant to be a historical movie. It's a revenge exploitation flick set in WWII, and the bad guys being the target of revenge here are the Nazis. I get that. At the same time, there's something so utterly morally corrupt about creating an unrealistic fantasy where badass Jews torture Nazis. It's the kind of thinking that has led to America using torture on captives: ultimate evil requires an equal response. It's so much against the ethos of the survivors of the Holocaust that it's embarrassing to watch. It's misguided revenge porn.
Ah, but if only the story that was being told was better. As it is, it's not so much a story as much as a sequence of masturbatory dialogues where Tarantino gets to feel clever about himself. People talk and talk and talk, and although there is an overlying sense of tension, it's so predictable every time it becomes tedious. There's just so many times we can watch a Nazi being passive aggressive with an undercover Jew before the shtick becomes boring, and each of these last so damn long... You get twenty whole minutes of a Nazi talking racist shit until the inevitable violence happens and Tarantino gets his money shot. We're talking porn-levels of sophistication, here, except it's about murdering evil Nazis.
It's well-directed for sure, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent do an amazing job, but man, that script is a big pile of self-indulgent crap. And I say this as someone who loves early Tarantino.
Review by TriseultBlockedParent2020-06-29T22:23:06Z
I do NOT get why this movie gets so much love.
I get that it's not meant to be a historical movie. It's a revenge exploitation flick set in WWII, and the bad guys being the target of revenge here are the Nazis. I get that. At the same time, there's something so utterly morally corrupt about creating an unrealistic fantasy where badass Jews torture Nazis. It's the kind of thinking that has led to America using torture on captives: ultimate evil requires an equal response. It's so much against the ethos of the survivors of the Holocaust that it's embarrassing to watch. It's misguided revenge porn.
Ah, but if only the story that was being told was better. As it is, it's not so much a story as much as a sequence of masturbatory dialogues where Tarantino gets to feel clever about himself. People talk and talk and talk, and although there is an overlying sense of tension, it's so predictable every time it becomes tedious. There's just so many times we can watch a Nazi being passive aggressive with an undercover Jew before the shtick becomes boring, and each of these last so damn long... You get twenty whole minutes of a Nazi talking racist shit until the inevitable violence happens and Tarantino gets his money shot. We're talking porn-levels of sophistication, here, except it's about murdering evil Nazis.
It's well-directed for sure, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent do an amazing job, but man, that script is a big pile of self-indulgent crap. And I say this as someone who loves early Tarantino.