Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation-Western is the first of his eight features to disappoint. It’s entertaining enough, and it contains many of the qualities that make his movies fun and thought-provoking, but it feels more like a Tarantino knock-off than fresh new work from the man himself. This is mainly due to the fact that it doesn't have much of a story. The narrative, which concerns a freed slave who teams up with a German bounty hunter and finds himself in the unique position of being paid to kill white people, is spread paper-thin across the nearly three-hour running time. While most Tarantino films are long and meandering, the plots and characters are sufficiently engaging to justify their auteur's indulgence, and Tarantino has always done an excellent job of keeping the viewer off-kilter and unsure what lays around the next narrative bend.  Django, however, is predictable and, dare I say, even humdrum.

“Django” is very unique character from the world of the Italian spaghetti-westerns. If Clint Eastwood was the "Man With No Name," Django could be called the "Name With No Man." The original 1966 Sergio Corbacci film Django, starring Franco Nero as the titular character, was so successful that many Italian film distributors took advantage of Italy’s lack of copyright laws and slapped dozens of future and preexisting spaghetti westerns with titles like Django Kill, Django Shoots First, A Pistol for Django, and Few Dollars for Django. Some of the films feature a character called Django, but many do not, and only one was an official sequel starring Nero. Tarantino's idea to take this figure, unattached to any specific actor or persona, and recreate him as a slave in the American South is inspired: who better for the master appropriator to bend to his own purposes than this most appropriated of cinematic characters?

Unfortunately, Tarantino hasn’t written a very interesting Django for Jamie Foxx to play in this film. He looks great shooting guns in cool costumes, but he is a generic screen cowboy in all ways other than his skin color, with a flimsy backstory and a cookie-cutter revenge motive. Tarantino seems much more interested in Christoph Waltz’s German dentist turned bounty hunter and Samuel L. Jackson’s elderly house slave. These two are far more interesting than Django is, but we’ve already seen what Waltz and Jackson can do with Tarantino characters and dialogue in far superior movies. The lack of fresh, exciting characters played by actors who American audiences have never seen (or haven’t seen in a long time) is one of the major letdowns that separate this movie from Tarantino’s other seven pictures.

Django has great action sequences and cool music, as we've come to expect from this writer/director, but none of the depth and perspective that make his work truly special. This picture seems more interested in being a good time than a great film—unlike all the other films he has directed which strived to do both and succeeded magnificently.

The movie also shares far too many similarities with Tarantino’s previous movie, Inglourious Basterds, and it's a comparison in which Django suffers. Django, like Basterds, is a quasi-moral revenge fantasy, but it doesn't take on the issue of slavery the way Basterds tackled the Nazi fascism.  It's fairly devoid of subtext, with no greater agenda than condemning slavery and exacting bloody revenge on the white South. This is a far cry from the multi-layered revenge tale in Basterds, or even Kill Bill and Deathproof. The slaveholders in this movie are one-dimensional in a way that the Nazis of Inglorious Bastards never were, and although both films benefit from the immensely watchable Christoph Waltz, he is incomparably more effectively used in Basterds as the villainous “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa, a role the likes of which comes around once every fifteen years if we're lucky.

Django is sloppily written, leaving vast areas of subject matter underdeveloped or completely untouched.  It is lazily cast, with novelty cameos from overused actors replacing Tarantino's usually-inspired choices—choices which have added real substance and subtext to roles in past films. Django provides no unique perspective on either the antebellum South nor the Western and blaxploitation film genres. The film is marketed as a spaghetti western, but there is nothing of that genre in this movie that hasn’t already become (due in great part to Tarantino’s influence) part of the standard language of modern westerns and other action films. It often plays more like a genre parody than an homage or a clever deconstruction, and while its satirical scenes can elicit a laugh, they also rob the film of any real feeling of danger—a critical element in Tarantino’s work. Unlike Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds, Stuntman Mike of Deathproof and Ordell Robbie of Jackie Brown who are all terrific villains that both charm and frighten an audience, the “bad men” in Django Unchained are disposable cartoon characters, who are too easily blown away and dismissed.  Even Samuel L. Jackson’s character, the most interesting in the film, isn’t developed enough to give the picture enough heft.  

More complaints: the photography, by Tarantino's go-to DP Robert Richardson, is visually flat and uninspired, a major waste of the setting's potential. The film is choppily edited—it's the first picture Taraninto has made since the premature death of his editor Sally Menke, who he always called his most important collaborator. It's always difficult to gauge the contribution of a film’s editor, since the best editing does not draw attention to itself, but I can’t help but wonder if this film would have been better had Menke been around to cut it. 

Almost everything I have written in this extended capsule is a very critical and much more negative than one would think for a film that ranks just shy of my list of the top 20 films from 2012. This is because Quentin Tarantino is one of my favorite directors and I've looked forward to and enjoyed all his previous films. Django breaks his impressive streak of outdoing himself and exceeding my expectations every time. I liked it, but I think the western genre and “Django” deserved better from QT.