Quinten Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds is about as accurate to the Second World War as Kill Bill was to the present day, and while watching the movie I bought the conceit because this is Tarantino territory, and I was entertained. But, in retrospect, his revisionist history is offensive not so much because it’s dreadfully arrogant of Tarantino to see himself as so high above fidelity to the past, but because his distortions serve a viewpoint—a fetish, even—that would at best make Hammurabi proud. Sure, the same could be said of the cantankerous Kill Bill or restorative Death Proof, which both hid behind the politically correct armor of feminism. But Inglourious Basterds cloaks itself in the broad notion that all Nazis were douchebags and all Jews were mistreated, so it’s fair game to see the Jews hit the Nazis where it hurts. Tarantino is not Jewish; he has no angst to work off. Rather, he’s scorning Germans (and, implicitly, Jews) because he doesn’t just want to make another revenge fantasy, he wants to make the Revenge Fantasy—even if it’s his third (fourth if you count Kill Bill’s two volumes) in a row.

Tarantino’s Nazis surely get their due—either from the “Inglourious Basterds,” a brutal brigade of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt—giving a funny, good-trouper performance), or Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French Jew orphaned by the S.S. I’m sure Tarantino’s admirers, and young Jews like the Seth Rogen character who liked Munich because it showed the Chosen People finally kicking some ass, will approve of Inglourious Basterds’s dehumanization of Nazis. But wouldn’t they be offended that, for the eponymous squad of vengeful Semites, Tarantino has assembled a pitiful bunch that, save for the “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth), looks shlubby and undifferentiated? To top that off, the director has faithfully followed old-Hollywood convention by casting a glamourous star as their commanding officer: a Gentile good ol’ boy with better looks, better lines, and much more chutzpah than his men—men who fade into the background whenever he’s onscreen.

The Nazis are dehumanized, but so is everyone else: Tarantino converts his characters into little toy stereotypes, who, when wound up, amble down the quickest path toward bloodshed. The writer-director has an undeniable ear for dialogue, and he can make his characters sound like people—witty, ingratiating people, at that. But he betrays their human characteristics if it provides him an excuse to stage a clever set piece. Why else would Dreyfus (who looks like Uma Thurman) begin as a battered, sympathetic, movie-loving peasant girl, and end up glorified as a cold-hearted mass murderer with a shallow fixation on femme fatale glamour? Oh, that’s right. So Tarantino can squeeze in more movie references and squeeze out more blood. And the stiff-upper-lip Britisher (Michael Fassbender) who joins the Basterds, and reeks of suavity and finesse and noblesse oblige, is made a former film critic. Is the director trying to flatter me into giving him a good review? Nah. He’s probably just fanning the flames of his movie-trivia-drenched ego—massaging his fantasy self. Only a few minor characters—like the German father of a newborn—seem to have anything going on beneath a veneer of cool.

The true extent of Nazi horror is only touched on once, in the first scene of the movie. Colonel Hans Landa (the electrically chilling Austrian actor Christoph Waltz), the S.S.’s infamous “Jew Hunter,” manipulates a French farmer into admitting that he’s harboring “enemies of the state” beneath his floorboards. In the minutes that slowly tick away before the hidden Dreyfus family succumbs to German bullets, the scene is brilliantly written, directed, and acted. Waltz is so ingratiating, and yet you see glints of genuine evil in Landa’s cold eyes and back-slapping smooth talk. His is the evil of opportunism—you buy his rotten humanity, and shudder at the incongruity between his placid Aryan smile and the antisemitic propaganda he invokes, which you know he’s too smart for. Landa thinks his vision is clear because he sees through prejudices, which is why he, a “German hawk,” can think like a “Jewish rat.” But the analogy Tarantino feeds him is too clever; the writer outsmarts himself with his own fancy-pants epigrams. He does not follow through on what could be revealing screenwriting. Instead, he runs for cover as soon as the bullets fly, and shits on his own scene with a misplaced parody of spaghetti-Western music, capped off with a misplaced parody of The Searchers (1956) as Shosanna bolts out the door. The Searchers is famous for its maybe-he’s-racist-maybe-he’s-not portrayal of a Civil War veteran (John Wayne) who hunts down the Comanches that kidnapped his niece. Thematically, it’s relevant—but is an American director, who’s shallowly reducing World War II to Tom and the Jerries, really trying to draw a parallel between the Master Race and Manifest Destiny? He teases us with Pitt’s part-Indian Yankee called “Apache,” whose trademark is to scalp his Nazi son-bitch victims, but this is a clear case of mixing metaphors. A multifaceted artist could foreseeably make the comparison and have it be enlightening; Tarantino uses “deep” thoughts as mere decorations—flimsy trinkets that “prove” his own cleverness. They’re as hollow as Landa’s cold-hearted pleasantries.

Cleverness is what Inglourious Basterds is about. Cleverness and the barbaric pleasure of eye-for-an-eye revenge—the only drive that Tarantino’s painted-cardboard characters possess. Nazism is used as an aphrodisiac for this because it can be used for this; who’s going to come out and defend perpetrators of genocide? Tarantino’s art is in drawing attention to himself, but if one so much as thinks about what he says in his movies, one violates his grandiose vision—and, worse, is considered joyless or square. The director has it both ways: His keen sense of what’s politically correct (probably a defense against those who called him a racist for his movies’ liberal use of the  “‘N’ word”) makes his fictional avengers seem just; but, like Andy Warhol, Tarantino can hide behind chic, shallow amorality, as well. Then there’s that third layer: that he’s an artist, albeit a postmodern one who can pilfer as he pleases. And because he’s self-conscious, and because he does have talent and artistic flair, he can claim to be an alchemist who transforms scuzzy exploitation flicks into Oscar buzz. Hardcore fans of schlock vindicate themselves with him as its martyr. But despite having titillating artful touches that get it damn-near close, Inglourious Basterds is never elevated to art; it’s just exploitation inflated by money and self-importance.

There’s a movie-within-the-movie: a propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) that seems to be nothing more than shots of a Nazi sniper shooting and reverse shots of his anonymous victims histrionically dying. But when Tarantino cuts to mocking closeups of Hitler (Martin Wuttke) laughing at the carnage, you wonder, How’s that movie any different from Inglourious Basterds? We even see the fake film’s producer crying tears of self-admiration. Is Tarantino in any position to mock this?

Was I entertained by his movie? Yes. Is that all that matters? No. A good entertainer can make you pleased with facile things, even if there’s nothing in the attic and the basement is full of worms. In The Dark Knight, for example, Christopher Nolan’s smash-bang pacing kept one unaware of the suspicious subtext. Tarantino’s a smoother craftsman than Nolan, but more careless about what he says through his cartoon mouthpieces. He turns carelessness into a rancid personal style, a kind of spoiled-child anarchism. I don’t think he’s being false to his values or personal vision; he wants to give us what entertains him. But what entertains him could entertain a three-year-old. His is movie art for beginners because it’s movie art unabashedly reduced to the bare minimum needed to satisfy our collective pleasure principle. The hip ambiguities of Jackie Brown have degenerated into a wet-dreamworld that suffers from a pop-culture infestation and an antisocial hard-on for vengeance.

Since Tarantino’s self-infantilization is on par with the late Michael Jackson’s, his estimation of what gives his audience pleasure has become insultingly low. Yeah, we like sex and violence, and who hasn’t, at some point, been wronged and fantasized about a showy retaliation? It’s one thing to bring teenage daydreams—which often feed on the silly, evanescent movies that hormonally overwhelmed adolescents seek refuge in—to the screen, but Tarantino seems in denial about how silly his reveries were. Violence in movies doesn’t need to serve some social function, and I don’t think the average viewer is turning into a psychopath because of it. (S/he may be becoming desensitized to psychopathy, but that’s another story.) But violence in a great film serves a narrative purpose or follows a dramatic logic; it’s motivated. Violence for its own sake, as it is here, is masturbatory; violence motivates the plot. It’s lewd, neanderthal fun, if smartly, prettily executed—but that’s all, folks. Tarantino fails to show here that he grasps this, which makes him small potatoes. For all his talent, he seems dead-set on plateauing creatively; he resists the adult world like Peter Pan, but he’s aggressively lacking in innocence. His content is hedonistic and yet his style has become snobbish. Loving trash does not make one a vulgarian; aggrandizing trash does. Tarantino’s merger of simplifications and distortions with grandiloquent references and “personal touches” is enough to fill a garbage dump. At worst, it can make complicated issues like torture seem cut-and-dry.

Inglourious Basterds fulfills and exacerbates A.O. Scott’s dictum that movie marketing is handing arsenic lollipops to our inner children, but this film’s even guiltier than a Transformers 2 or Star Trek or G.I. Joe because we’re resigned to their big-franchise stupidity and opportunism. If there is a shred of genius in this film, it’s a wan, needling one; for me, it was like having my face shoved in dog shit and being forced to admit I enjoyed it. I didn’t react this way to Pulp Fiction, which was also a distillation of sorts. And I certainly didn’t react this way to Death Proof, which, at its best, turned reductivisim into concision; it had a dedication to craft that made it gleam like a vintage convertible, freshly waxed by its beloved owner. It even seemed fascinated by real human lives, flubby though they were. But a movie like Inglourious Basterds can make you feel corrupt—and not in the way that moralists fear. Tarantino, despite his wrongheaded pretensions, has the energy requisite to make you feel that maybe this is all you need: a plateful of horny, violent dog shit. He celebrates, in earnest, the history and potential of cinema, and it amounts to—fuckin’ up Nazis. What a transcendent downer. Said energy is hard to distinguish from glitz and self-satisfaction, but it does amount to vision—grubby and complacent though it may be. Some day, perhaps, Tarantino will move beyond self-worship—which has been incorporated into his hero worship—take a step back, and see that good movies are more than the sum of their parts. But not with this film. Who’s an inglorious bastard? Someone who has massive artistic and financial power, and wastes it.