For better or for worse, Tarantino is Back.

Tarantino’s seventh film Inglorious Basterds has just about everything you’d expect from the director who brought us gems like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Unfortunately, Tarantino’s unwavering devotion to his own style hurts Inglorious Basterds more than it helps.

The plot of Inglorious Basterds, if you could even call it that, focuses on a rag-tag group of Jewish-American soldiers called "The Basterds" and their ruthless campaign against the Nazis. The Basterds are little more A-Team than they are Saving Private Ryan, something Tarantino exploits whole-heartedly by attaching ridiculous nicknames—like the “Bear Jew” and “Little Man”—to his main characters. By the time Hugo Stiglitz’s back-story appears on the screen, with its flashy jump-cuts and a soundtrack straight out of Superfly, the audience has forgotten about the 1940s completely, and the Nazis have become nothing more than another bad guy in the revenge plot of an average B picture.

The Basterds aren’t the only people in Occupied France who want to kill the Nazis either. There is Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Parisian Jew whose family was killed by the Nazis when she was a child. Dreyfus’ motivation for revenge is remarkably similar to The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) in Tarantino’s 2003 film, Kill Bill. In fact, their stories are so similar, taht Tarantino uses nearly identical jump-cuts and zooms to communicate Dreyfus’ emotions. But the lazy reuse of old material isn’t my biggest criticism of these sequences. I was more annoyed with the half-hearted portrayal of Shosanna Dreyfus’s story—even the smallest interludes in Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction had more to them than this. The audience never really saw anything more than a superficial sketch of this character--there needed to be more reminders of her pain and hatred of the Nazis. Blowing off a Nazi soldier who has a crush on you doesn’t really do it for me. When she finally decides to enact some kind of plan, the most the audience sees is a sloppy montage. Unfortunately, the audience never sees the transition from the crying girl in the country to the strong theatre manager in Paris so, Shosanna Dreyfus never becomes anything more than a stock character.

Despite Tarantino’s inability to the leave his devotion to the 1970s and its cinema at the door, this film does have some entertainment value. The Basterds’ leader, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is about as back woods as you can get and Pitt’s performance is one of the film’s highlights. Pitt’s character speaks in hyperbole and brings in obscure southern references throughout most of the film, but Pitt’s charisma makes up for it and even the most ridiculous lines still sound natural. Tarantino’s decision to take the marketable, leading man stereotype and turn it on it on its ear is something straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook, and it pays off in spades.

The foil to Pitt’s Aldo Rain is Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the “Jew Hunter.” Col. Landa proves to one of the most interesting and enigmatic characters in the film. Waltz’s Hans Landa is reminiscent Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. What made Jackson’s performance so great in Pulp Fiction was the way he meandered through the dialogue, always casual, always in control. But the source of Col. Landa’s power is more mysterious than Winnfield’s and operates on a larger scale.

The way Col. Landa allows his suspects to slowly reveal information through seemingly innocent conversation makes audiences squirm the same way they did when Jules Winnfield asked Greg for a bite of his hamburger in Pulp Fiction. But while Winnfield’s authority comes from Marsellus Wallace, his boss, Col. Landa’s actions appear to be his and his alone. Even when he is around his superiors all of his actions are self-motivated; there isn’t a single character that tells him what to do. This implies that Col. Landa is not directly ordered to do these things, but he actually wants to do it, making the character something truly evil. I only wish the audience was given more background on his character so we could get a better understanding of Col. Landa’s motivation.

Despite the film’s overall sloppiness, diehard fans will be pleased with Inglorious Basterds. The long takes, quirky dialogue, little tributes to the mid ‘70s B picture, the chapter titles—it’s all there. But there aren’t any scenes that steal the show and Tarantino’s normally fresh dialogue starts to get stale about halfway though. At its best, Inglorious Basterds is a superb action film, but the tricks that made Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown so interesting are sorely lacking here. And while this film is distinctly Tarantino, but by the end it starts to look like another homage to Tarantino’s ego.

Overall rating: 7/10

Here is a link to the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sQhTVz5IjQ