Blood,Guts & Glory - Just The Way Tarantino Does It

Rating: 6/10 (14 March 2013)

Ostensibly a tribute to spaghetti Western genre of films, DU delivers the goods as far as gunplay and bloodbaths go - in the first ten minutes a man and a horse get their heads blown off. Then the body count gradually increases every 20 minutes till this almost 3 hour serious version of Blazing Saddles comes to an end. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy watching it - viewed it a second time as a matter of fact - but felt that Tarantino could have done better with a more viable screenplay and organised direction. There seems to be a lot of disjointed moments that need further elucidation - more than coincidental that the very first plantation visited happened to harbour the fugitives from justice that the main characters were seeking for. Christoph Waltz turns in a memorable performance as Dr King Schultz, German expatriate ex-dentist who speaks impeccable Oxford Dictionary style English, who has turned to bounty hunting as a calling, evidently seeing more profit in removing whole (bad) bodies than just bad teeth. He is supposed to be the good guy, but at times comes through as a self-righteous stuck-up pompous a-- who justifies his actions with pieces of legal documents (warrants) authorizing him to take down outlaws, dead or alive (preferably the former). Jamie Foxx as the eponymous character seems rather stiff and hesitant in the beginning, as if thinking what to do or say next, and only gradually comes out of his shell, as it were, much later in the film, when he's dressed ostentatiously in blue boy costume and astride a noble steed and gets to do a lot of shooting and talking. Leonardo DiCaprio is the delightfully despicable plantation owner Calvin Candie, who enjoys slave fights and black wenches, with a dialogue of high vocabulary to match Schultz's. Other characters do little more than just stand aside as living set decorations. Samuel L Jackson as Stephen is in my opinion the most unforgettable and noteworthy character in the film; he seems to revel in his role as the subservient yet outspoken black mayordomo to Mr Candie ("who dat niggah on dat nag?!"), although coming across as comical and stereotypical Uncle Tom or Stepin Fetchit, he proves to be very perceptive and astute than given credit for - as in the scenes where he correctly deduces that Broomhilda and Django already know each other previously. A lot of the movie is taken up by needless and irrelevant scenes, like the Regulators aka Bag Men (precursors to the KKK), and Django's trip to the Dickey Quint mines in the hands of 3 inept and inefficient mine minions, in which Tarantino has a bit role speaking in a rather atrocious and laughable attempt at Aussie Strine. And to the more historically savvy, there's the numerous anachronisms and factual errors to nitpick at - dynamite, drinking straws, sunglasses and the Henry Repeater rifle, to name a few. But don't let this review put you off from seeing DU. It does have its glorious moments, blood and gore and all. But as with Tarantino films, don't expect a history lesson to base your book report on.