Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2009

Quentin Tarantino blends the spaghetti western with the WWII action epic to create this swaggering, blissfully amoral action fantasy. It’s difficult to categorize, but the term “audacious” keeps cropping up. There are so many references, both blatant and subtle, to movies and to The Cinema in general that you’d have to call this a movie about other movies. And it is this fusion of styles and sources that makes it work, especially for fans of the director. The film’s two main plots—the exploits of a ruthless band of Jewish-American Nazi-hunters and those of the secretly Jewish woman owner of a Parisian movie theater—come together at the end in a rewrite of history that only a Tarantino could even contemplate. The film consists of often overlong and oddly disjointed sequences of sharp, increasingly suspenseful dialogue, frequently laced with incongruous dark humor, each culminating in an eruption of extreme violence. Personally, I found Tarantino’s penchant for killing off so many of his protagonists a little off-putting, and the machine-gunning of a theater-full of people, even if they were Nazis, was not something I enjoyed watching. But dull it ain’t.