Worst Tarantino film

Rating: 4/10 (31 December 2012)

I should start off by saying that I love Tarantino. I should also mention that I went into this movie wanting to love it. But even with my pro-Tarantino bias, I only found a handful of scenes and characters the least bit interesting.
The main problem with it is the cheap humor and reliance on vengeance to have the viewer connect with the story. It's some new (unfortunate) genre of slapstick-ultra-violence. The laughs are awkwardly placed into a mostly serious and action-packed narrative (and I use the description "laughs" loosely). Combining laughable moments in a serious scene, even a bloody scene, is one of Tarantino's strengths ( think "Oh man, I just shot Marvin in the face." -Pulp Fiction), but the attempts at humor in Django are childish and silly (a clansman going home because no one values his wife's KKK masks, wt-f?). They border on Wayans Brothers' type humor (not a compliment).
My second point: The reliance on vengeance to keep the audience interested is, unfortunately, the foundation of this film. It's almost as if a group of frat boys got together and brainstormed on how to stick it to racism. "How about the racist dudes get shot in the balls?!" "Yeah! F*#k racism!" And, again, this is territory that Tarantino has covered brilliantly before (anti-Nazi sentiment throughout Inglorious Basterds) so he should be able to pull it off. But unlike Eli Roth smashing in the skull of an SS officer with a bat, Django's bloody scenes are pointless Van Damme-style shootouts that appeal to only the most base emotions.
Maybe the difference in the successful examples from previous movies and those of Django are the two-dimensional nature of the main characters in this movie. Django, doesn't change very much from the beginning of the film to the end. And I don't just mean emotionally...for some reason, he's already a pretty good shot when he first picks up a gun? Django's character is more about the surface-level bad@*# imagery than, say, Vincet Vega, who is a bad@*#, but who is capable of emotions and character development within his role as a bad@*#. Django is just a cardboard cutout of a character with black sunglasses and a six-shooter.
I guess I should mention the good parts of the movie too: Samuel L. Jackson's performance is great. His character has some of those attempts at cheap laughs, but the quality of his acting and the believability of the character make you forget about the cheesy moments. I also thought the scene where Dr. Schultz lets Django choose his own outfit was honest and believable, not to mention one of the more clever moments.
I know I'm in the minority, but I was greatly disappointed and would not recommend seeing it in theaters.