Django Unchained:
Two years before the Civil War, a slave named Django is freed by Dr. King Schultz, a German immigrant, and former dentist turned bounty hunter. He informs Django that if he helps him track down the Brittle Brothers, the slavers who separated him and his wife, he will help Django find his wife. The two start a jounrey across the South, taking down ever dumb-ass and slave owner in their way, until they finally find a Mr. Calvin Candie, a Francophile slaver who is in possession of Django's wife, and who is a bit of a loose cannon. Now, the film is actually quite funny, as many of Tarantino's films can be. Christoph Waltz, who played the villainous Nazi in Tarantino's previous film Inglorious Basterds, here is comical and brutal as Dr. Schultz. His peculiar accent and intellectual way of talking make everthing he says sound almost funny in a way. He has a ridiculous-looking carriage with a big tooth on top of it. Jamie Foxx is at his best in years as Django. At first shy and brittle, he, almost instantly after being freed, becomes a bad-ass killer. There is a sequence half-way through the film, where Django and Schultz are pretending to be slave owners, and there is a moment when Django looses his grip on himself, almost becoming this character he is playing, and Foxx plays it brilliantly and convincingly. Leonardo DiCaprio gives an over-the-top, comical, and threatening performance as Mr. Candie, an abusive, brutal, and evil man who enjoys torturing his slaves and forces the strongest to fight to the death. It may be Oscar-worthy. He often pulls off over-the-top comedy and suaveness back-to-back with his inner nature: cruelty and evil. The cast also includes Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson, Jackson giving a sometimes comical performance as the secretive and sinister head house slave at Candie's plantation. Quentin Tarantino, Tom Savini, Zoe Bell, Jonah Hill, and Franco Nero (the original actor from the spaghetti-western the film is named after) all make either clever or funny cameos in the film. The film has some fun action scenes, including some revenge scenes, and an amazingly gory shootout at the climax, which is reminiscent of film like The Wild Bunch. The film also has some great drama, and really makes slavery out to be a cruel and horrible thing, and basically perosnifies the slave owners as not only fools, but, mainly in DiCaprio's case, the Devil himself. The film pays homage to the great westerns, from the beautiful camerwork (including a shot of white flowers being sprayed with blood and landscape shots), to the old-looking credits, to the use of the original Django theme song. In fact, the original Django film was considered, like many of Tarantino's films, to be extremely violent for the time. One criticism is that the film has very uneven tones, switching from hilarious comedy sequences, to fun adventure, to grisyl and ugly scenes of violence and torture. People have criticized the racially offensive language, but, in fact, although most of the film is historically inaccurate, being a revenge fantasy like Kill Bill, the dialogue is very accurate to the way black people were talked to, and even how they talk to each other. All the villains get a brutal comeuppance, but the film takes little breaks to have some funny sequences, including the hilarious scene where some KKK members want to raid Django and Schultz's camp, only to argue about the fact they "can't see shit" with the masks they are wearing. The shoot-outs and revenge sequences also employ beautiful cinematography, interesting musci and sound, lots of blood, and slow-motion. Be warned, the film is extremely violent, but some of it is played for laughs, like in the final shoot-out at Candie's house, some poor bastard is continually shot in the knees and gut (two very painful places to be shot) but never dies, even after the fight is over, and the fact the white walls are so splashed with blood, that even after the house is cleaned, the blood still stained. Django Unchained is a smart, funny, gory, violent, fun, thrilling, satisfiying spaghetti-western, one of Tarantino's best works, even better than Basterds. (There is even a full scene where it is in German with subtitles, like how Basterds was mostly in French and German with subtitles.) The film offers thrilling action, some great and colorful characters, brutal violence, clever humor, bloody gunfights, and some very important and truthful comments on slavery and racism. 5/5 stars.
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