'Inglourious Basterds'

Here are a few of my not-favorite things: scalps graphically removed, throats savagely slashed, heads brutally beaten by baseball bats, necks forcibly strangled, fingers sadistically twisted in open wounds. The ideal person to be reviewing Quentin Tarantino's violent World War II fantasia, "Inglourious Basterds," I am not, but as the Basterds knew all too well, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do.

Not that there aren't elements to savor in "Basterds" or, for that matter, in Tarantino's public persona. He has a huge enthusiasm for movies of all kinds -- who else is going to champion the Roy Rogers films of William Witney -- and, judging by his public appearances, access to endless live-wire energy. But at this point in his career, frankly, it feels like his personality is stronger than his films.

For one of the curious things about "Basterds," the above list of violent acts notwithstanding, is that it is simultaneously bloody and bloodless. Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees.

That lack of vigor almost seems to be what the writer-director is after. For one thing, though this film was inspired by a 1978 "Dirty Dozen" knockoff that was more conventional both in the spelling of its title and its story, "Basterds" splits the narrative focus into three.

The plot alternates among a group of bloodthirsty Jewish American GIs under the command of Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt), a fugitive Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) who owns a movie theater in Paris and a German SS officer, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who specializes in ferreting out Jews. (The Jewish element may sound strong, but it's just a plot construct: The characters might as well be renegade Benedictine monks for all the difference it makes).

As if this split weren't enough, "Basterds" breaks itself up yet again, this time into a series of chapters, more or less self-contained set pieces, that play less like elements of a coherent whole than like a series of linked short films. Some of these set pieces have their virtues, but more than a few of them go on too long and, by emphasizing the film's episodic nature, hamper its ability to hold together as a feature.