Quentin Tarantino, depending on who you ask, has not been relevant for a while (5, 10 or 15 years, depending on your level of contempt), and after the very public misfire that was Grindhouse, for a celebrity-director like him it must have been difficult to bear. In his latest film he's cast one of the most famous men on the planet, Brad Pitt, and that ensures his new venture, Inglourious Basterds, will be far less likely to be ignored. It follows the paths of a hitsquad of Jewish American soldiers, the much famed "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa, and a young French cinema owner called Shosanna.

The film is split into five chapters; the first showing Landa interrogating a French man about the whereabouts of a Jewish family, the second introduces us to "the basterds", the third shows Shosanna meeting a young German soldier, the fourth introduces a very famous German actress into the mix and the fifth is ... well, the finale. The cast are all fine but nothing too out of the ordinary. Pitt sleepwalks through his role, Diane Kruger has proven quite the scene stealer in the past in films like The Hunting Party, but she's not given much to do here. Daniel Brühl is a very fine actor, but utterly wasted here and none of Pitt's "basterds" have any real opportunities to shine. Mélanie Laurent has been a promising actress for a number of years and she's her usual natural self, giving the best performance on show. Sadly that isn't saying much as Christophe Waltz as Landa is the only other member of the cast to scrape above average in a very deliberately quirky turn.

Is that all you want me to do Quentin?

There are a couple of problems with this film that stop it being anything above average and the first is the writing. Many scenes in the film consist of characters waffling on, and waffling on, and when they've finished waffling on they waffle some more and it frequently stymies the film. Also, what is broadly going to happen in a lot of the scenes is fairly predictable so it doubly has the tendency to drag things out. For example in the opening credits the one actor whose character is named by Tarantino is Laurent's Shosanna, so when halfway through the opening scene it is said one of the family (who it is obvious long before Tarantino shows us are hiding in the house) is her, it kills any tension as you know she's going to live.

This brings on the second major problem. Pretty much all the key scenes in the film (be they the opening inquisition, Shosanna meeting Landa later on, or the big scene with Diane Kruger's character in the basement) all rely heavily on tension to prevent it just being characters who haven't any detailing at all just talking endlessly ... and Tarantino the director fails to infuse any genuine atmosphere or tension into the piece at all. It's a very uneven effort from him, especially given his use of music. In the past he's used his magpie-esque abilities to fuse his influences, but here flicking from Sergio Leone use of Ennio Morricone to David Bowie only creates a jarring effect.

So it is a film with a decent cast who aren't asked to do much, they are given an extremely wordy screenplay without much action to break up the monotony and Tarantino executes in a fashion which exacerbates rather than irons out the shortcomings coming from the blueprint. For the most part it's watchable and the editing is good enough to ensure it doesn't necessarily feel its two and a half hour length, but it does drag and doesn't entertain through the dialogue as his films have done in the past. This means when you're waiting for the scant bits of action to kick in, there's not a tremendous amount on offer. As such what should have been a fun, fast, ferocious film is relegated to an empty and occasionally turgid offering that the good bits, when they eventually come, fail to elevate too far: and it means Quentin will just have to handle still being called irrelevant for a good while longer.