If This Is What We Have for Entertainment, Who Needs the Nightly News?

Rating: 5/10 (4 February 2013)

I've been a long-time Tarantino defender, always feeling that his films are smarter than anyone gives them credit for. Every time Tarantino releases a movie, people get up in arms about how violent, irresponsible, etc., etc. it is, for some reason holding him to task for "violence in our media" when the makers of the James Bond movies, Bourne movies and other such violent fare get off scot free.
And while I still don't think Tarantino, his movies, or movies in general for that matter should be held responsible for violence carried out by people living in the real world, like it or not what is happening in the real world has an impact on how I respond to movies. That may be why I nearly reviled Tarantino's latest, "Django Unchained," a throwback to the bloody spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and his ilk.
Tarantino is always recycling old genres, and I think enjoyment of his movies frequently depends on how much you enjoy the genre he's playing off of. I don't happen to like westerns very much, so that may be partly why I was unable to warm to this film. But I think that's only a small part of my reaction. Mostly, I felt for the first time that Tarantino was making a juvenile film, wasting his considerable talents on violence as pornography. In other Tarantino films, violence has been beside the point -- the films themselves have been violent, but the violence has been what happens in between the moments when we are learning about his characters and enjoying a story well told. In "Django," violence IS the point. It's about the horrible, degrading things human beings do to each other, and our protagonist is a blank slate of a character with a one-word motivation: REVENGE. Revenge as a primary motive is boring unless the character seeking revenge is interesting, and Jamie Foxx isn't a talented enough actor, nor Django a fully-enough realized character, to make it interesting. The only person who makes the film worth watching is Christoph Waltz as a ruthless bounty hunter. He's so good in his role that the film fiercely misses his absence once he's out of the picture; unfortunately, the film goes on for another 30 minutes or so after Waltz exits.
The final hour or so of this movie exists in my head as a vague blur of stomach-churning devastation. The bullets, blood and bodies fly, and while I appreciate Tarantino's determination to show us what happens to a human head when you shoot it with a shotgun (which is far more than most violent movies do), I had about as much fun watching it as I would an autopsy or a car accident.
I live in Chicago, where the news reports contain a daily body count of the people shot in the city overnight, usually crimes motivated by revenge. And elsewhere, we've been recently inundated with news of slaughters and shootings around the country, crazy people who perceive that they've been wronged in some way taking out their fury on those who had nothing to do with it. When this kind of casual human carnage is so tragically real, as we are reminded on a daily basis, a movie that revels in it feels tacky as well as pointless.
Time to grow up Quentin and start making movies for adults.
Grade: C