Django Unchained

Now it's no secret that Quentin Tarantino is one of my most despised directors. Not because he is a bad director (case in point: Reservoir Dogs) but because he considers himself God's gift to directing. Meaning he can do whatever he wants because Tarantino does what he wants. And then critics shower him with praise for being adjectives like bold and daring.

With that said, Django Unchained is very unlike other Tarantino films, but very similar to one in particular: Inglourious Basterds. And I want to say I like it, but at the same time I don't and both options make me feel a teensy bit racist.

But let's sum up the plot. Right before the Civil War, former German dentist turned bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) buys former slave Django (Jamie Foxx) to help him find three criminals who only Django knows look like. Upon killing them, Schultz takes it upon himself to train Django in the ways of bounty hunting. But Django's wife has been sold into slavery to a known horrible plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Django and Schultz hatch a quite complicated scheme to buy her back from Candie.

Complicated? Yea for sure. Long? Getting there. Bloody? Holy hell. This film is tinted in red. The action buff in me was kind of pumped. The excess blood is almost too much at times but boy is it satisfying to see a bad guys stomach shoot out a stream of blood all over the room. The blood budget must have been more than what they paid the actors.

Of course I'm joking. Tarantino decided to do a little homage to the spaghetti western of old. And the first half of the movie accomplishes that. We have a terrific black superhero here, delivering hot lead justice to an oppressed south. And this would have been a fine movie if Django Unchained didn't take some different paths with its storytelling.

Django doesn't seem to know what to do with itself. We have this uber violent revenge/rescue story that uses a slavery ridden south as a clever backdrop to motivate both the audience and the characters. But then the movie seems like it's trying to say something. And no one can figure out what the hell it's trying to say. Very violent scenes like a mandingo fight to the death and dogs ripping a runaway slave apart seem to be just violence for violence's sake and it is quite uncomfortable, and not in the good, makes you think about oscars sort of way.

On the one hand, this is the sort of movie everyone wants to see. African-Americans, at least if I was one, would want to see a strong black hero rising up against the, quite-literally, most violent slavers in existence. Whites want to see the same thing because they want to symbolically see that part of their past wiped out in gruesome fashion.

But where Inglourious Basterds succeeds in that fashion, Django fails. And I honest to God wish I could explain why. Tarantino just seems to glorify violence for violence's sake without sparking the necessary discussion or dealing with the seriousness of what he is doing.

Django is still quite entertaining full of good performances and ironically, the least like any Tarantino film I've seen. Don't expect any oscars though.

3 out of 4 stars

-Christopher O'Connell

P.S. I looked it up. Leo actually cut his hand when he slammed his fist on the table. All that blood all over his hand? Actual blood. Now there's an actor.