Ten minutes of viewing any Quentin Tarantino feature inevitably leads to the same question: what does this guy smoke in the morning?

His films are a tangle of multiple plot lines that occasionally bump into each other and are powered by an old testament morality that has, in this late stage of civil society, been mainly consigned to comic books.
What keeps him from sharing a B-movie niche with Stephen Seagal is an unearthly sense of balance. While you wouldn’t call Tarantino’s directorial style a cinematic ballet, he is certainly Cirque du Soleil.
He juggles bits of weirdness like few directors around.

Tarantino’s latest film, “Inglourious Basterds,” is true to form. Set during World War II it has been widely described as a revenge fantasy. That is to say the villains, in this case German soldiers and their leaders, fare very badly—as does historical accuracy.

The film bounces between three story lines. The first—and the most fun—involves a special army unit that has been dropped behind enemy lines to wreak havoc on German troops. It’s a Hebrew dirty dozen made up of Jewish soldiers bent on giving Europe’s Nazi occupiers a taste of their own medicine. Their methods are brutal, as any Tarantino fan would rightly expect.

“We’re in the Nazi killing business,” says the unit’s commander, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, “and business is booming.”
Lieutenant Raine is played by Brad Pitt sporting an over-the-top southern accent and enjoying himself thoroughly. There is a hint of a demented John Wayne in his performance. His moral compass isn’t so much broken as simply tossed aside and it liberates both Pitt and Tarantino to skate across the carnage of twentieth century warfare. “Inglourious Basterds” is often like “South Park” with hand grenades. It offers up wickedly sharp humor at the most inappropriate moments.

The second story line centers around Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) a German officer assigned to hunt down Jews still hiding in occupied Europe. In what may be the film’s best scene. Col. Landa manipulates a French farmer—a decent and courageous man—into betraying the neighbors he has been hiding.

As a writer, Tarantino has an exceptional ear for dialogue and he is at his most literate when conversations are circling around impending violence. Samuel Jackon’s speech in “Pulp Fiction” just before he guns down a group of frightened frat boys turned drug dealers is a cinematic classic and while Lana’s interrogation of the French farmer doesn’t quite find that level of poetry, it is exquisitely evil and layers a deathly frost over the proceedings.

Christoph Waltz is a talented actor and he, like Brad Pitt, delivers the kind of deliciously skewed performance that makes Tarantino’s best films so entertaining.

The third storyline follows a young Jewish woman (Melanie Laurent) who escapes from the farmhouse and eventually comes into possession of a movie theater in Paris that the Nazis choose to host the premiere of a propaganda film.
The key members of the German high command are scheduled to attend the premier including Hitler himself. A prize like this is a magnet for anyone invested in killing off Nazis and finally all of Tarantino’s characters have a reason to be in the same scene.

While Tarantino may have a gift for juggling plotlines it is infuriatingly unreliable and in the film’s climax he stumbles—badly. The heady riffs of intrigue and violence that punctuate the first half of the film are replaced by B-movie clichés, as implausible as they are disappointing. Worse, Christoph Waltz’s character suddenly transformed into silly cartoon adding fuel to the debate over whether Tarantino is a genius or just permanently trapped in adolescence.

While “Inglourious Basterds” isn’t destined to be a film classic, it is a classic Quentin Tarantino film: an exquisite brew of dialogue and violence—most of the time.

You can view a trailer of “Inglourious Basterds” on the web at:
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3738173977/