If you thought Inglourious Basterds was bad... This is camp crap which gets worse and worse

Rating: 1/10 (12 January 2013)

Tarantino's latest, Django Unchained, reminds those of us - well, those of you - who had, perhaps, forgotten that at the end of the day cinema is essentially about making a fast buck by getting as many bums on seats as you can before you flog off the DVD rights. Certainly individual directors, actors and producers like to be involved in something which is a little less like selling your arse to the highest bidder, but when the chips are down making a mountain of moolah, and then some, is the name of the game. That is the only way I can explain the abysmal, insulting mess that is Django Unchained.
If you thought Inglourious Basterds - whose USP was the existence of a vastly successful Jewish death squad sticking it to the Nazis in occupied France - was as bad as I did, Django Unchained won't persuade you that Tarantino has regained his touch. In fact, with notable exceptions, for example Jackie Brown, you find yourself wondering whether he actually did have a touch in the first place and whether perhaps it was more beginner's luck.
Tarantino's latest, I read somewhere, is a paean to B movies, and from the cheesy music to the the sudden close-up zoom he uses you can see that the man did, perhaps, have something like that in mind. So the obvious question is: why on earth bother? Is a meal of greasy, second-rate badly cooked food any better if you declare it is a paean to fast food? Why on earth did Christoph Waltz, Leonardo Di Caprio, Morgan Freeman and Jamie Foxx allow themselves to become involved in these campest of drearily camp capers? What was Tarantino trying to do? I ask because it really isn't obvious.
At times his film comes across as a comedy (although the scene of the Ku Klux Klan complaining that they can't see where they are going because the eyeholes cut out of the white bags they are wearing won't let them is about as funny as a wet day in Dudley. Oh, and the Klan weren't even founded until seven years after the events of this film are said to take place. That kind of sloppiness permeates the film. There's also an inexplicable scene set in bright sunshine although we are supposed to be in winter, and the previous and subsequent scenes show deep, deep snow. And where did those snow-capped mountains come from in Texas?).
The first hour is reasonably intriguing but then the decline sets in and the final scene is so ludicrously bad, you forget that earlier the film had to a certain extent held your interest, if only out of some vague curiosity as to where it was all heading.
The blood flows with abandon, of course, and although it is gratuitous, it is no worse than other films (for example, a scene in The Cabin In The Woods). But not for the first time I have wondered about Tarantino's sexual psyche: he does seem to emphasise pain and gore a great deal. Is that perhaps how he gets his sexual jollies? But what the hell. This film will probably clear up at the box office because there is a sufficient number of idiots out there who are willing to sit through dross like this. But my advice to anyone who considering giving this a whirl is: don't bother.
This so far has an average rating of 8.7. Don't let that fool you. It is terrible.