Quentin Tarantino has, to put it crudely, some big brass ones. He mixes tones & moods recklessly, & he has such a cocky, consistent vision that the movies hold you, whether you think they should or not.

His WWII movie Inglourious Basterds begins with as grueling a scene as I can remember, in his classic, dilatory style. It’s in the same vein as the great scene between Dennis Hopper & Christopher Walken in True Romance—a character talks & talks & talks & talks, & you know something horrendous is going to happen, but you don’t know exactly how or when. In this case the talker is the smiling, genial, gabby SS Colonel Hans Landa, known as “The Jew Hunter,” chatting in an unhurried, self-delighted way to a French farmer.

The Jew Hunter is played, spectacularly, by the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, & he makes one of the great villains I’ve ever seen in a movie. The scene opens the picture with a gut-punch—a stylized blast of melodramatic tension deepened into tragedy by its historical context. Then, in the very next scene, QT flings historical context over the side of the movie, & invites us to enjoy some wacky Nazi-scalpin’ fun.

Scene Two shows us Brad Pitt as US Army Lt. Aldo Raine, sporting a hokey hillbilly accent (he claims to be a descendent of frontiersman Jim Bridger). Aldo recruits a corp of Jewish soldiers to enter Europe prior to D-Day to do “one thing, and one thing only…killin’ Nazis.” These killings are gruesome & sadistic & often end with the taking of a scalp; they’re intended to sow terror among the Reich, & they do.

This storyline parallels another, set in occupied Paris, involving a young woman (Melanie Laurent), secretly Jewish, who runs an art cinema & is forced to host the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film. Other subplots & episodes are strung between these two main strands. The Jew Hunter re-enters the narrative as well, & all of the currents eventually converge in a grand finale so outrageous that it amounts to alternate history sci-fi.

Stylistically, the movie is much in the debt of the Spaghetti Westerns—indeed, the eccentrically misspelled title derives from The Inglorious Bastards, one of the several English titles for Enzo Castellari’s amusing 1978 Italian WWWII actioner Quel maledetto treno blindato. But you’d never mistake Basterds for anything but a Tarantino movie, all the same.

Though the movie did well at Cannes & seems to be doing well with audiences, & though Waltz has (very rightly) been celebrated for his performance, there have been, predictably, some high-minded critics who have found the movie tasteless & trivializing of the real horrors of WWII, which are still in living memory.

One could argue that the historical proximity of, say, the real-life Old West & its genocides don’t, for most critics, invalidate the cowboy movies of the ‘30s & ‘40s (the era of some of John Ford’s best work, for example). But instead of going down that road, let’s simply stipulate that Tarantino’s movie is shockingly tasteless. The question then whether it should be condemned on that basis.

Whether intentionally or not, what Inglourious Basterds seems like to me is the dramatization of little kids playing war, & in its gleeful, jocular presentation of atrocities against Nazis by Jews, it’s asking us whether we—all of us sweet, non-racist non-violent liberals out there in the audience—have the capacity to enjoy indulging that fantasy. For me, the answer is: sure.

Rationally, of course, I realize that the fanciful campaign that Tarantino is suggesting would have been roughly as despicable as what happened at, say, Abu Ghraib. But by putting the targets in Nazi uniforms, & by making Jews the avengers, it becomes possible for many of us not only to approve of killing them, as indeed most of us would in real life, but to enjoy it, chuckle at it, wallow in our satisfaction over it—bluntly, to get off on it.

Of course, this is nothing remotely new in movies, or any other medium—delighting vicariously in revenge & torture is one of the oldest & commonest themes in narrative art; most of the Spaghetti Western genre that Tarantino so loves hinges on revenge. But Tarantino’s intelligence & skill, & the high profile of the movie’s release, is likely to agitate critics all the more. If he weren’t such a remarkable filmmaker, if it was just another exploitation picture, Inglourious Basterds would probably be both contemptible & dismissible (though it still might be shamefully entertaining). Instead, it’s a bizarrely challenging work—an epic guilty pleasure in which the guilt runs as deep as the pleasure.

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