Hyped by its creator as a spaghetti western cast with World War II iconography and the career-defining masterwork that his recent "lightweight" films empowered him to make, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds finds the pulpy auteur setting up shop in Nazi-occupied France. Here he follows, in an unusually straightforward manner, a pair of story lines: a crew of Jewish-American soldiers carrying out their mission to kill as many Nazis as possible (bringing home scalps as trophies) and a young Jewish woman masterminding revenge against the Nazis who murdered her family.

Leading the Nazi-scalpers is Aldo the Apache, a fast-talking cartoon of a man played by Brad Pitt, in a brash performance that recalls both his star-making turn as Thelma & Louise's malevolent charmer and his ridiculously funny work in the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading. Whatever spaghetti-western-ness the film boasts comes from this Nazi-scalping story line, as Pitt's good, bad, and ugly band of murderers carry out their Sergio Leone–style mission in classically voluble Tarantino fashion.

The young Jewish woman's story line, however, is pure comic book—good comic book—with Tarantino working in a restrained yet still-bright style rich with melodrama and Hitchcockian tension-building exercises. When the two plots eventually converge, the story lines mesh thrillingly, but their styles remain distinct. It's this lack of stylistic gestalt that grounds Inglourious Basterds among the ranks of good strong movies that are in no way masterworks. Everything you love and hate about Tarantino films finds a home in Inglourious Basterds: the colorful prattle, the insistent thrills, the horrifying violence, and the long, boring conversations you're manipulated into paying close attention to because AT ANY MOMENT SOMEBODY MIGHT BLOW SOMEBODY ELSE'S FACE OFF. Most interesting is how the film beckons to Tarantino's detractors: If anything is likely to lure those repulsed by the violence of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Death Proof into an even fleeting hunger for blood, it's the possibility of watching Hitler and his minions get theirs.