BLOODY VALENTINE TO SPAGHETTI WESTERNS.
→ DECEMBER 11, 2012 Writer-director Quentin Tarantino has made one of 2012's best movies with Django Unchained, a weird, wild, and violent crowd-pleaser that serves as a raucous salute to the spaghetti western.
Set in the antebellum South, the story follows a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who is taken under the wing of Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German bounty hunter out to get the vicious Brittle brothers. Django can identify these outlaws for Schultz, and soon the duo become bounty hunting partners. Django and Schultz then set out to rescue Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the infamous plantation Candyland, run by the urbane, but malevolent Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Bloody mayhem ensues.
The episodic plot directly nods to the Germanic hero Siegfried's epic quest to rescue Brünnhilde, a saga which Schultz relates to Django at one point. And like any good myth, Django
Unchained sees our hero encounter numerous strange and violent beings along the way, characters brought to life by Tarantino's latest eclectic ensemble.
Don Johnson plays Big Daddy, a plantation owner who dresses like Boss Hogg and seems like a sinister Burl Ives. Jonah Hill and the the screen's first Django, Franco Nero, make cameos. The cast also includes Walton Goggins, James Remar, Michael Parks, Amber Tamblyn, Robert Carradine, Zoe Bell, Tom Savini, Bruce Dern, Tom Wopat, Lee Horsely and Dennis Christopher.
The real standouts in the cast are Waltz, DiCaprio, and Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Candie's loyal, old house slave Stephen. This character, as Tarantino has explained, is meant to personify some of the most hated of African-American stereotypes, while also serving as a crafty villain in his own right. Jackson really sinks his teeth into it and has great chemistry with DiCaprio, whose character he essentially raised. DiCaprio also clearly relishes his larger-than-life role, playing Candie as a dandified bastard. Foxx is solid as Django, stripping away his movie star persona as he also did in Ali and Collateral. He's tough, yet vulnerable.
As with any Tarantino production, though, it's his words that are the real stars here. There are many instantly quotable lines and funny bits. Django Unchained is designed as a crowd-pleaser and it most certainly delivers on that promise, offering up plenty moments of over-the-top gunslinger violence and humor. One of the most striking things about the story, though, is how well Tarantino balances the tone, veering between absurd comedy and brutal scenes of life for slaves in the antebellum South. The casual and incessant racism on display is shocking, but sadly accurate for the era depicted.
Tarantino uses cool, but anachronistic songs for the soundtrack of the film, which celebrates the lower tiers of spaghetti westerns rather than the more acclaimed ones. It's more Sergio Corbucci than Sergio Leone. In many ways, Django Unchained feels like a film that was made in 1970, became a cult classic, but can now be found in a $5 DVD bin (that's not a knock).
My only real gripe with the film is its length. It runs 160 minutes, but drags a bit near the end of the second act, especially after a shootout that would have been the climax of any other western. It's also during this minor lull that Tarantino makes a distracting and self-indulgent cameo. These gripes aside, though, Django Unchained is a hell of a lot of fun and definitely a must-see in the theater.
THE VERDICT
Quentin Tarantino doesn't shy away from the horrors of slavery in Django Unchained even as he delivers a weird, wild, and bloody violent crowd-pleaser in this raucous salute to the spaghetti western.
