DJANO UNCHAINED Review

DJANGO UNCHAINED Review

By Darin Skaggs

     Some directors make one movie a year, others take longer.  One of those directors is Quentin Tarantino, who has made seven films in sixteen years, the last one being 2009’s Inglourious Basterds.  Now he has come out with his new film Django Unchained.  This is yet another great addition to Tarantino’s film collection.

     On previous occasions he has dealt with gangsters, bank robbers, samurais and most recently Nazis.  With this new outing Tarantino has tackled slavery.  The film starts with a group of slaves traveling across the desert plains.  Eventually a man comes asking to take away one of the slaves named Django.  His name is Dr. King Schultz who ends up being a bounty hunter and takes Django so he could identify some men and kill them.  They team up and eventually devise a plan to find Django’s wife and get her back.

     Like most of Tarantino’s films this film is darkly funny, overtly violent and has great music.  Also like all the other of his films the acting is brilliant.  This film contains some of the greatest performances of the year.  Christophe Waltz plays the great Dr. Shultz, the bounty hunter pretending to be a dentist, Jamie Foxx playing the title role, Samuel L. Jackson with an amazing performance as a loyal slave.  The best performance comes as a surprise from Leonardo DiCaprio.  He leaves his comfort zone and plays a straight up bad guy that is really goofy and funny. 

     Even though this film is funny and entertaining some things keep you distracted from fully enjoying the film.  The film is set two years before the Civil War.  Slavery is a big part and Tarantino keeps the dialogue accurate.  The N-word is thrown around constantly in the film.  It makes sense for the time, but still is used so often that it is sometimes uncomfortable.  There is also, mostly towards the finale of the film, a lot of violence.  It is shocking and sometimes hard to watch all of the violence go down.  These are staples of Tarantino’s filmmaking so hardcore fans will not be disappointed, but people not familiar with his work might be offended.

     As entertaining as this film is, the morality of the film is questionable.  In Tarantino’s previous film Inglourious he made a revenge tale on the Nazi’s.  It felt like he was punishing them for what they did.  This film looked like it was a revenge tale on slavery and racism.  There is a possibility that this was never the intention, but sometimes the film just seems like an excuse to be violent and just happens to be set in the time of slavery.

     Tarantino has made another great film with some insane violence. It features some of the best performances of the year. This is one of the top movies of the year and top three of Tarantino’s.