Eastwood in shades.

Rating: 4/10 (27 August 2013)

Displaying the same disturbed imagination of a twelve year old that has made him the darling of hipster film watchers Quentin Tarantino's Django is filled with all the predictable heavy handed juvenility one has come to expect from the "vaunted" writer director. It is his typical mix of gratuitous violence and sadism, hints of humor and a script sprinkled, no plastered with his two favorite spicy words. Marinated with heavy hand and pretension it is a slow go from the outset buoyed along by intervals of explosions and gun play to keep you awake for it's nearly three hour run.
Bounty hunter/dentist King Schultz (Chris Waltz) buys ( in a very violent fashion naturally) slave Django (Jaime Foxx) from some surly traders and sets out to train him as an assistant in the bounty trade. It becomes a lucrative partnership for the pair but Django yearns for the return of his wife Brunhilde (a subtle Wagnerian touch by QT) and a strong desire to shoot surly unkempt Southerners. Arriving at the plantation of Calvin Candy (aptly called Candyland) in Mississippi he finds her and they try to create a ruse to win her release. House slave Stephen (Sam Jackson) however suspects something is up and it leads to the same blue print mayhem to be found in Tarantino's films, in this case a Kill Bill rehash with lead instead of swords.
As Django, Foxx mopes and Eastwood's most of the way while the rest of the cast overacts ferociously, particularly in scenes between Candy and Stephen. The rest of the cast is relegated to being as unctuous as possible with pull cords reciting the same two words.
For Tarantino fans it will probably not disappoint with its lusty bloodletting, tough talk and folks getting blown up. But with little to add to a canon of work fraught with heavy handed self indulgence it remains another one of his coloring book fantasies with dirty words and buckets of blood. The only difference is his cartoon characters have changed costumes and time traveled to other lands. Everything else is the same. It is another one of his big budget B movies.