Tarantino's "Basterds" surprisingly tame war movie

CANNES  – History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino.

While his "Pulp Fiction" arrived late at the Cannes Film Festival and swept away the Palme d'Or in 1994, his World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds" merely continues the string of disappointments in this year's competition.

The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.

Box office expectations for this co-production that will see the Weinstein Co. handling domestic and Universal handling international distribution still will be considerable, but there isn't much of a chance of the kind of repeat business Tarantino normally attracts.

The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari's 1978 WWII film. In Tarantino's version, a small group of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine terrorizes Nazi soldiers in Occupied France, performing shocking acts of savagery and corpse mutilations. How close they come to war crimes is unclear because, in a very un-Tarantino manner, he shows little more than a few scalpings that earn Aldo the nickname "Apache" from the Germans and one execution by a baseball bat.

As a matter of fact, for a war movie there is very little action. People talk, soldiers scheme and a German war hero pesters a French woman in Paris.

Otherwise, the action comes in short bursts such as the machine-gunning of a hiding Jewish family through a farmhouse floorboards and a shootout in a bistro.

Reportedly, Tarantino has been having a go at this script for more than 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, "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 head of Germany's film business, Joseph Goebbels, wants to hold the premiere of a movie celebrating the exploits of the army's finest sharpshooter, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), in Paris. All the top Nazi brass will be in attendance, including Hitler. A British lieutenant (Michael Fassbender) parachutes behind enemy lines to organize the Basterds to blow up the cinema.

Unbeknown to the Allies, however, the cinema's owner, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jew who seeks revenge for the execution of her family, has the same general idea, only she wants to lock the doors and set the theater on fire. Best of all for her, the head of security for the event is none other than the villainous Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who killed her family.

The maneuvering by both groups -- the Basterds and Shosanna and her lover-assistant Marcel (Jacky Ido), with the Germans always seeming to be one step away from discovering the schemes -- occupies most of the movie leading up to the premiere. Then Tarantino rewrites the end of WWII.