Reviewed By

Christopher Armstead
It's late in the year 2012 and Quentin Tarantino, via the Weinstein Company, has released a new movie.  That's a big deal, and probably always will be because that's the kind impact Tarantino has on the film community.  Sometimes after watching a Q.T. joint we think that maybe, possibly, that the Weinstein's might want exert some kind of control over the man, reign him in a bit, maybe trim the size of these epics that he makes down to a size where the average consumer can actually digest them… but I know that's crazy talk.  All that nonsense aside today we watched 'Django Unchained', which was… wonderful.  And… frustrating.  Basically all the things we come to expect from a Quentin Tarantino film in his post 'Reservoir Dogs', 'Pulp Fiction' career.

Real quick like, Dr. King Shultz (Christopher Waltz) is a German bounty hunter in south Texas.  Don't ask how this came to be.  He needs to find these three brothers with a nice little bounty on their heads, tracks down a slave in the midst of transportation named Django (Jamie Foxx) who he knows is intimately familiar with what these gentleman looks like, makes a deal with some slave traders to acquire Django… more or less… and adventure is now afoot.

Now Dr. Schultz is personally none too fond of slavery, but in this instance Django being in bondage works in his favor a bit.  Besides, once the job is done he has agreed to grant Django his freedom.  What Django plans to do with this new found freedom of his, once this job is done, is to track down his wife Hildie (Kerry Washington) with whom he got separated from after the two tried to make a run for it. 
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Easy enough.  Thing is that Hildie's sale transaction happened in Mississippi, not the best place even for a free Black Man in 2012… uh… I mean 1858… so Dr. Schultz proposes that Django hang out with him for the winter, kill up some white folks with bounties on their heads, sock away some cash and then in the spring the both of them will go down to Mississippi and find out to whom Hildie was sold to.

Turns out Hildie was sold to the cotton farm of the scurrilous Calvin Candie as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and I gotta tell you, I haven't seen actor seem to have so much fun playing a slave owner since Chuck Conners as Master Tom way back in 'Roots'.  Leo was completely off the chain for the relatively short amount of time he was in this movie.  Dr. Schultz has a plan to relieve Hildie from the grips of Mr. Candie, it is convoluted, and has something to do with an original term created just for this movie called 'Mandingo Fighting'.  Think 'Fight Club', but with slaves, and tapping out is not an option. 

Schultz's convoluted plan should work because the truth of the matter is that Mr. Candie isn't all that bright, but his ultra loyal house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) is that bright, and he's knows something isn't right and he's about to mess some stuff up.  Just know that boy finds girl, boy will unfortunately lose the girl, but the boy will try to get the girl back.  It's not going to pretty when he does this.

As long as Quentin Tarantino makes movies, I believe I will always like his movies because he copies… I mean 'homages'… the movies I love the most, and he does it well.  When this movie opens, with songs written by Ennio Freaking Morricone, along with the trademark quick zooms that were prevalent in Italian Spaghetti Westerns… you know you're in for a treat.  Then there's the closing sequence which steals the theme from 'My Name is Trinity' which almost made me cry since that's like my favorite spaghetti western.  But that's the beginning and the end of 'Django Unchained' which means we still have 160 minutes worth of movie in-between to deal with.

Now it's not that these 160 minutes are bad, oh good heavens no, but it is an odd mixture of brilliance and overwrought Tarantino-esque self-indulgence.  I realize that Tarantino is a brilliant writer, arguably one of the best ever, but he still might not be quite as good as he thinks he is.  There were parts of 'Django' that felt bloated, overlong, and unnecessary.  Of course this was nothing that an editor couldn't have fixed, maybe shaved a good twenty minutes off of this movie, but I gotta assume that the director was in the room while this edit was going down so this is what we got.

But enough of that because the good still heavily outweighs what little might've been no-so-good in this movie.  Foxx, Waltz and DiCaprio were fantastic in this movie, the supporting cast was just as good and nobody squeezes more out of Samuel L. than Quentin Tarantino can.  Then there are the numerous cameos because I guess the opportunity to work in an ultra-cool Quentin Tarantino movie is just too much to pass up.  In particular I thought that was Amber Tamblyn playing the whore in the window of that dusty town, but then that three second shot was all we got of her, so maybe it wasn't.  Ah… but it was.  Maybe she had lines that will be in the Blu-Ray extras, but here she was just a whore in a window.

We also enjoyed the fact that everything was so over the top, and it did work wonders here, at least for me it did.   I mean people who got shot exploded like vampires getting staked in 'True Blood',  and to that end the violence was insane.  James Remar does show up in two roles, which did have me confused since Remar-1 got his head blown off, but can you ever have enough Remar?  I don't think you can.  Plus the movie was consistently funny.  A lot of the stuff we probably shouldn't have been laughing at, but whaddayagonnado?

The bottom for me personally is that I enjoyed 'Django Unchained' quite a bit.  I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it was a ridiculously entertaining one.
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