Impeccable Production

Rating: 1/10 (1 January 2013)

This movie showcases Quentin Tarantino's love of spaghetti westerns, then skewed and presented in his own idiosyncratic, post-modern manner. Queue modern black music, awash with hip hop, gospel, soul, and funk, impeccable costumes, fine performances all round, and wonderfully lit cinematography. The film has Tarantino's gift for meticulous detail, funny dialogue, and colourful action.
Christoph Waltz plays his part with great charm, in a manner all to similar to his Inglourious Basterds routine, but with written with less flesh to round out his character. Jamie Foxx, the titular hero, is sidelined and outplayed by his sidekick, and everyone else in the movie, but he has little to work with, simply playing the quiet, surly ex-slave, driven only by the spirit of anger. Leonardo DiCaprio's pomp is fairly entertaining, but his character serves only to drive the story along, and serve as a vindictive and cruel villain, because that is what the story demands. Still DiCaprio throws himself in and plays with the usual intensity and enthusiasm that he has shown himself capable of the millennium. Samuel L. Jackson is fantastic, spewing his vitriol, with remarkable restraint and tenacity.
But despite the amazing production, the cool soundtrack, and terrific performances; the movie remains indulgent and overlong. The quick snap of Tarantino's script is gone, the funny cultural references replaced by trite verbosity, and junior school social history. Opening titles tell us the year the movie takes place, thankfully explaining its two years before the American Civil War, because: bless our ignorance. Much dialogue serves only to create a tenuous link between characters or propagate the story, with Tarantino uncharacteristically falling onto formula to weave his story. But what really makes this film terrible is the lack of moral direction. Violence is served to remind us of its shocking nature, or it is shot to titillate us, spouts of blood gushing through gunfights. And Tarantino seems completely unaware of this contradiction. He shows us that bad people use violence and it is bad, and good people use violence, but this is righteous, as if to say whatever the question; only violence is the answer. Where it is used to shock us, the audience was sent in to an uneasy silence, as we are reminded of a terrible period in our past, but just as it seems like he is starting to deliver a message about the state of society, he instead showers us with blood, and the full glory of cinematic violence, and how the characters profit from it.
The film is all guns and bluster, but only to disguise the emptiness of this exercise.