Two years before the Civil War, Django, a slave, finds himself accompanying an unorthodox German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz on a mission to capture the vicious Brittle brothers. Their mission successful, Schultz frees Django, and together they hunt the South's most-wanted criminals. Their travels take them to the infamous plantation of shady Calvin, There he who sets out to rescue his wife.
The horror that Django Unchained expresses isn't of slavery, finally, but of a filmmaker attempting historical tragedy while shackled by his own supercilious persona.
Waltz gives a great performance, mixing an outwardly genial demeanor with sudden bursts of violence, and a surprisingly kind heart for someone in a Tarantino film.
Wildly extravagant, ferociously violent, ludicrously lurid and outrageously entertaining, yet also, remarkably, very much about the pernicious lunacy of racism and, yes, slavery's singular horrors.
The movie moves, with crispness and intelligence, arriving at the most purely satisfying conclusion we could possibly ask for. Audiences are going to eat that last reel up. I know I did.
Django Unchained has mislaid its melancholy, and its bitter wit, and become a raucous romp. It is a tribute to the spaghetti Western, cooked al dente, then cooked a while more, and finally sauced to death.
...Tarantino being Tarantino, he doesn't just make a big, violent, sprawling western filled gunfights and clever talk and driven by revenge and Old Testament justice.
Django Unchained is 165 minutes and nothing much happens beyond talk and the provision of corpses. The plot lurches around and the artful structure of Pulp Fiction has been abandoned.
