Lumbering, way overlong Tarantino indulgence fest

Rating: 7/10 (7 July 2013)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave in a chain gang, who happens upon a chance for freedom when the eccentric Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) sets him free and leads him along for his own personal reasons. But Django has his own mission to be reunited with his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who he learns is being held as a slave at a plantation owned by the mean hearted Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio.)
Taking inspiration once again from his love of all things ultra violent, Quentin Tarantino here turns his attention to his appreciation of blood splattered spaghetti westerns from the 60's and 70's, with this ultra lengthy homage to another little known entry from the genre. Always finding new ways to be controversial, this time around his new film caused outrage among a vested minority with it's excessive use of the racial term 'nigger', even by other black characters. Although the term is casually thrown around through out the course of the script, it never feels gratuitous in any way, and probably does serve as an accurate reflection of the culture and attitude back then, and could even serve to highlight how the word could have deeper connatations of how blacks used it towards certain other blacks rather than just whites against blacks.
For the most part, the film seems on a desperate mission to bore you to death, lumbering along as it does at it's outrageously over-bearing nearly three hour running time, with long periods of no action among it's trade mark Tarantino usage of lengthy, lingering dialogue and exposition. It just fails to strike the balance right, and comes off feeling like a self indulgent love fest to one man's own passions. This on it's own won't endear it to the target demographic, and so it's left to more superficial things to save the day. When the action does heat up, more towards the end, it's appropriately blood splattered and ultra crazy, and it's carried along by a lively soundtrack blending more old school western tunes with modern hip hop beats, to maybe strike a balance between the generations, what with westerns being an old genre enjoying a resurgence.
It ultimately falls on the cast to carry something striving to be this epic, and so it is a blessing that the cast are so dynamic. In the lead, Foxx embodies the mean, moody manner of the lonesome cowboy, a knock in the teeth to the days when having a black lead in something like this would have been thought inconceivable, while following on from his involvement in Tarantino's last Inglorious Basterds, Waltz is on fine form here as a mysterious, eccentric man whose motivations and behaviour are never quite made clear. But it's Di Caprio as the villain who steals the show, investing the role as he always does with his intensity and dynamism, bending it well in to an evil role, served well with support from Samuel L. Jackson as an elderly sell out black worker who sees himself as a cut above the food chain. All these great performances, though, would have been better served in something more restrained and less illustrious. ***