DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)
Starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
A Weinstein Company/Columbia Pictures Release
MPAA Theatrical Rating: R
Django (Foxx) gains his freedom from Dr. Schultz (Waltz), a
dentist turned bounty hunter and together they look for Django's wife,
Broomhilda (Washington), who’s sold separately from him following a failed
escape attempt. Calvin Candie (DiCaprio) now owns Broomhilda and the race is on
to see if they can take possession of her before anyone in
"Candyland" catches on.
DJANGO UNCHAINED again finds Tarantino's head exploding with
riffs cribbed from older exploitation films. Unlike his previous INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, here he lets it all bleed out mercilessly without a shred of maturity, leaving much
undone and unanswered. Wanting to be a spaghetti western shoehorned into a '70's
Falconhurst styled slavesploitation film, DJANGO never finds the proper tone. Humor can be mined from racism when handled
properly but it's harder to find it in the subject of slavery. Needless to say,
Tarantino doesn't find it. DJANGO lumbers aimlessly, the shifts in narrative are clumsy
and for a $100 million movie, DJANGO looks and feels rather cheap. It does an
excellent job visually as a western but fails to catch any mood of the
antebellum South. The Django/Broomhilda subplot: stinker.
Packed with blink and you'll miss cameos from Don Stroud,
Franco Nero, Tom Wopat, Lee Horsley, Russ Tamblyn and Robert Carradine, DJANGO
has all it needs, except a steady head and heart behind the camera. A bonafide
hit, although it looks like Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell saw this one coming.
With James Remar, Bruce Dern, Zoe Bell, Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher and
Don Johnson as Big Daddy.
-EH
-EH
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