Django Unchained: Holy Tarantino!

In Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy Django Unchained, a bounty hunter(Christolph Waltz, the Jew-hunting Nazi colonel in Inglorious Basterds)  and a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) hunt down slave holders and slave merchants and dispatch them in increasingly creative and cinematic fashion.  The plot gives them each a credible motivation to do so, but this movie is really just a revenge fantasy aimed at American slavery.

Let’s not short the revenge film genre, which includes many top drawer movies – Winchester 73, The Searchers, Carrie, Gladiator, even The Virgin Spring and Zero Dark Thirty.  (If it’s a really good revenge film, people tend not to identify it as a revenge film.)  But Tarantino is never squeamish about the enjoyability of genre films, and Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal exploitation.

Waltz and Foxx are very good.  The most fun performance is by Tarantino fave Samuel L. Jackson as the malevolent house slave who uses his wiles to advance the causes of his dim masters and of slavery.

Django Unchained – from its title on – is a love letter to the spaghetti Western genre.  We have a title song that could have come from the Italian Ringo movies, lots of Ennio Morricone-like music and even the first movie Django himself (Franco Nero).  The titles are blazing red, and some of the locations (as in the Italian movies shot in Spain) are hilariously inappropriate (California oak grasslands for Mississippi, some rocky California desert for East Texas and a random sequence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, apparently just because Tarantino wanted to show some bison).  For spaghetti Western aficionados like myself, it’s a lot of fun.

There’s a lot of violence, including an especially gory final shootout that would have unsettled Sam Peckinpah.  One thing for sure – it’s a lot of movie for your money.