Mixed early reviews for ‘Basterds’

UPDATE: Variety’s Todd McCarthy bucks the trend with a decidedly enthusiastic review. He cites some problems, including first-half tonal inconsistencies, but otherwise finds himself swept up in Tarantino’s self-reflexive games:

By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that’s new for the director.

The best characters are non-Yanks, all of whom speak their own languages and one or two others to boot. But this commendable gesture toward linguistic accuracy is virtually the only realistic aspect of the picture, which otherwise soars on its flights of fancy and deliberate anachronisms — the use of David Bowie’s “Putting Out the Fire” at a crucial point is particularly inispired — and flattens out only when Tarantino gets too carried away with over-elaborated dialogue scenes, a problem that could easily be addressed with some slight trimming between now and the skedded August opening … (It’s) never less than enjoyable and more than that in the second half.

EARLIER: Blogger reactions to “Inglourious Basterds” may be scattered, but the first two trade reviews (we’re still waiting for  Variety to chip in) read fairly similarly, and not very positively at that.

The critics agree that there are tasty morsels in the stew — rapid consensus seems to be emerging that Austrian star Christoph Waltz spectacularly outshines the rest of the ensemble — but accusations of overlength, indulgence and narrative inconsistency are to be found.

Are we talking another “Death Proof,” a specialized item that will have its critical and public champions but doesn’t return its maker to the world-beating crossover status of this earlier work? It’s early days in terms of gauging critical response, but with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw crucifying the film (a “colossal armour-plated turkey from hell”), and the Telegraph indifferent (“not so much inglorious as undistinguished”), it seems the detractors will be plentiful.

Kirk Honeycutt at the Hollywood Reporter reassures the devotees that the film is “by no means terrible,” but  otherwise finds it a long, dramatically sluggish haul:

Reportedly, Tarantino has been having a go at this script for over a decade, 
and it looks like he never licked the dramatic problems. The “Basterds” are 
formed in 1941, then suddenly it’s 1944 and they have firmly established
 their reputation. But only one scene gives the flavor of what they do to
 deserve it.

Unlike Tarantino’s previous films, “Inglourious Basterds” does not build to 
a climax through a series of ingenuous episodes, each one upping the stakes
 and the tension, but rather it rolls the dice on one major operation.

The film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where
 actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy
 wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp 
fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B-movies as he
 was with “Grindhouse” nor riffing on cinema as with “Pulp Fiction” and the
 “Kill Bill” films.

ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge finds more to like in the film, citing stretches of “brilliance” and Tarantino’s  dialogue as redeeming factors, but finds the narrative too choppy to sustain the whole. Beware of spoilers in his review:

Inglourious Basterds is composed of a series of long-running vignettes strung together by a slender story thread. The problem is that no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, and, with some of the scenes running up to half an hour each, the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing.

And while much of the camerawork is tighter and more restrained than usual in a Tarantino opus, as befits the period, he still can’t resist imposing a myriad of ostentatious references to other films on his original story … Some film lovers might appreciate his homages, others might view it as an obtrusive demonstration of a dearth of original ideas.

Why do I have a hunch I might be one of the “others?”