Roughly one-third of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is so good that it very nearly excuses the other two-thirds.

After the self-indulgent nadir of Death Proof, the writer/director is back on more solid ground with this mashup of WWII epics like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes, filtered through his specific 1970s grindhouse sensibility.

It’s a weird mix. The period setting and grim subject matter aren’t the sorts of thing in which Tarantino usually traffics. This is, after all, a story about a secret squad of Jewish-American soldiers – assembled by Brad Pitt, in full corn pone mode – to kill as many Nazis as they can, as viciously as possible, with the shadow of the death camps hanging over every encounter.

When our heroes learn most of the Third Reich will be assembling at a Paris cinema for the premiere of Goebbels’s latest patriotic war movie, the Basterds plan an infiltration mission – but the theatre’s owner has a plan of her own.

When Tarantino uses his talents in the service of that story, Inglourious Basterds is a hell of a movie. The opening scene, introducing the magnificent Christoph Waltz as the Basterds’ vainglorious nemesis, is a stunner, and there are little moments throughout where the director’s bloodlust is perfectly matched to his characters’.

But there are other moments – as well as entire scenes – when it’s clear that Tarantino is either unwilling or unable to engage with the material on any level other than that of the 1970s Italian programmers that delighted him as a young movie addict. Inglourious Basterds isn’t about World War II; it’s about World War II movies as gleefully remade by a giddy kid who’s eaten way too much sugar and keeps trying to rewrite the action so it’s even more kick-ass.

Tarantino just can’t help himself, peppering the movie with incongruous references and unnecessary padding that turns even the most incidental scenes into self-conscious set pieces. And he no longer seems interested in giving his characters individual voices. Everybody talks like Quentin Tarantino, breaking into long, looping discourses on popular culture even when there’s no reason to do so.

Michael Fassbender’s character explaining that he’s a former film critic who wrote two books on the German cinema of the 1920s is one thing, but when a German soldier starts arguing with Pitt – in perfect English – over the precise definition of a Mexican standoff, it’s just ridiculous.

Shut up and shoot already. 

normw@nowtoronto.com