Not Top Shelf but Still Top Quality

Rating: 8/10 (8 August 2015)

Quentin Tarantino's seventh film falls short of his best work. It is still a great piece, but by the standard he's set for himself it doesn't make it to the top four of his films. Inglorious Basterds was his latest film proper to Django and it marked a return to top form for him. Arguably Inglorious is in the top three. And Inglorious was the last Tarantino film Sally Menke edited of before she passed.
I do not think it is a coincidence that Django was a step down from Inglorious with Menke not heading the editing room. She worked on every single Tarantino film prior to this and the only thing lacking, or that could have been better, in Django was the editing. A few scenes ran long and could have used her touch to tighten them up. One in particular that comes to mind is the bag head scene. It was funny but the laughs ran out before the joke was over.
All this being said Django is a very entertaining film and is well done in many ways. First and foremost though this film has to be viewed as a Western. Any view other than this is doing a disservice to the film. Critics hit out at Tarantino as they always do when this film came out and a majority of them did not view the film as it was intended. Besides the writing and directing which are always top notch from Tarantino, the acting from Kerry Washington, Samuel L Jackson, and Leronardo DiCaprio were superb.
Django Unchained is the story of a freed slave who, with the help of a German bounty hunter, sets out to rescue his wife from a savage plantation owner in Mississippi. When you watch this movie have a good time. The topic of slavery is dressed and not glossed over, but what this film offers is a entertaining Western where Django (Jaime Foxx) turns the conception of a slave on its head two years before the Civil War.