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Craig — When a film begins with the introductory disclaimer "Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France :" there should be no doubt you're in for a gamble of a movie experience.

Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to up the ante with a title like "Inglourious Basterds."

Meet the Basterds, a group of Jewish-American soldiers dead set on inflicting as much pain as possible on the members of the German Army, the Gestapo and high-ranking Nazi officers during World War II.

Led by First Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt), this ragtag squadron observes no rules and shows no mercy toward the Axis opposition. Joining forces with British intelligence, they learn of the Nazi's plans to gather at a Paris movie theater for the screening of a propaganda film.

As they conspire to make the event memorable in their own way, the cinema's Jewish owner (Melanie Laurent) has her own plans for a night Hitler (Martin Wuttke) will never forget.

Pitt doesn't need the sizable scar located beneath Raine's jaw to make his character memorable, but it certainly looks cool. Of course, his scruffy mustache and Tennessee good ol' boy accent complete the look as he barks orders at his underlings and banters with the prisoners they take.

You don't want to be sporting a swastika on your uniform with these guys - if you survive the assault, you'll be wearing a matching tattoo on your forehead. That is, if you don't run afoul of Sgt. Donnie Donowitz (Eli Roth), a baseball-bat-wielding psychopath feared by Germans as "The Bear Jew."

"Hostel" director Roth looks positively gleeful acting out the kind of mutilation for which he has become notorious, doing his own filmmaking as well, as the director of the movie-within-a-movie, "A Nation's Pride," the story of the young Nazi (Daniel Brühl) the Germans consider their Sergeant York.

Brühl is fine as the shy soldier corrupted by real-life Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), but the most intriguing officer is the shifty Col. Hans Landa, known as "The Jew Hunter," masterfully played by Christoph Waltz.

French actress Laurent is also quite powerful as Shoshanna Dreyfus, the lone survivor of one of Landa's raids. It's a mark of quality when the lesser-knowns outshine the "guest stars," who are no less skilled - Diane Kruger as a German actress-turned-spy for the Allies, an unrecognizable Mike Myers as a British general, Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill and Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator.

After a decade of planning, Tarantino's vision of WWII finally comes to fruition with no less audacity or graphic violence than one could expect from the guy who created "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill."

But even with something as tried and true as historical fiction he reminds us that it's his universe, and we're just living in it. You don't have to look too carefully to spot the inaccuracies in the story, but it's all intentional for the sake of pure, unbridled excitement.

Even so, Tarantino's attention to detail in the mise-en-scÃne is outstanding in maintaining the look of 1940s France, whether it's an ancient tavern used as a rendezvous point or a pastoral glen littered with the corpses of Nazis sans scalps.

If you thought the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan" was harsh, you may want to avert your eyes.

The writer/director punctuates the flow with compounded, deliberate dialogue, but the plot is what really drives home the entirety of the movie - although it has a few similarities to last year's slow, stilted "Valkyrie," the suspense is so much more superior, leaving the audience biting their nails right up to the volatile climax.

After 2008 films like "The Reader" and "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" that humanized those involved with Nazi activities, "Inglourious Basterds" is a daring combination of art house sensibilities and the unsympathetic tendencies of the exploitation genre.

You may laugh, you may cheer, you may puke, but rest assured: It will get a reaction out of you.