Django Unchained review

                 It has been said that filmmakers essentially make the same film over and over their entire career, in an attempt to perfect an approach to their obsessions. Tarantino has stated that he is deeply influenced by the Italian Spaghetti-Western director Sergio Leone and that “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” is his all-time favorite movie. Though he has worked in many different genres—and many combinations of which they derive—one can see a through-line of the Spaghetti-Western revenge-movie archetype in almost every single one of his outputs.  
                “Django Unchained” is Tarantino’s latest film and his first period western, complete with horses and hats and the rest of it. The story centers around a freed slave named Django (Jamie Fox) who teams up with a German gun-for-hire, disguised as a vagabond dentist, named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Together they travel the pre-civil war south to find and save Django’s slave wife, who is being held against her will by a plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). On the way, they run into many other outlandish characters and take on southern racism with a fervent righteousness and genuine bloodlust.

                Fans of Tarantino will feel like they got what they paid for with this film. It’s brutal, vicious, sardonic, and sometimes quite clever. His ear for fast dialogue is still in tune and his stand-offs, shoot-outs and set-pieces are just as well shot and cathartically satisfying as they were in “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill”. The performances he gets from his cast are always interesting and memorable, particularly DiCaprio who seems to be enjoying himself as the comically pathetic villain. Unfortunately all of these praises have to come with a somewhat-deflating ‘but’.

                 Throughout the film we never really get a clear attachment to our hero’s journey because Django is the least interesting and least developed character in the entire movie. Jamie Foxx does well enough in his role, but he doesn’t command the same kind of screen presence that Clint Eastwood did as the quietly dangerous Man With no Name. Instead, what was probably written and acted to a character of mystery comes off as frustratingly vague; especially since every other character around him is so large and specifically drawn. Though some complain that this movie is too long—and that is certainly a valid complaint—had it spent a little more time on getting to understand  Django’s pathos, it might have actually felt shorter.

                While this is easily one of Tarantino’s funniest scripts, it’s also one of his jokiest. If you have the stomach for this movies particular brand of dark humor then you should laugh plenty. However, it seems like an awful lot of scenes are really only set up to deliver a coming punch-line and oftentimes the dialogue between characters feels less like biting satire and more like flippant sarcasm. Whereas the comedy of his earlier films always came from a nervous energy or truthful tension built within the scene, in this film it is never quite as naturally delivered.

                Though there is enough to keep you immersed in this film I feel like it doesn’t really satisfy past its base interests. Like “Inglourious Basterds”, “Django Unchained” turns well-documented history into exploitable genre opportunities for Quentin to play around in. His cinematic talents and his ability to entertain are always apparent but his films have become less and less challenging as he has aged. This is by far his most conventional, and most linear movie yet and his approach to the (shall we say) touchy subject matter seems alarmingly detached and disingenuous. 

                The good news is I can’t call this a bad movie because too many things about it are so well executed and it's so much fun to watch. But even as large chunks of it are firing on all cylinders, those moments don’t conceal the cracks in its thematic infrastructure.

Grade: B-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2012