Tarantino Becomes a Slave to His Self-Indulgence to Give Us a Boisterous Blaxploitation Tale!

Rating: 9/10 (30 April 2015)

Quentin Tarantino's Spaghetti Western-with-a-dash-of-blaxploitation, Django Unchained, is obscurely referential, extremely indulgent, and deliriously over-the-top; in other words it is the kind of shrewd, eyebrow-raising bombast we've come to expect from Tarantino.
Set in 1858, the film opens on a foggy, frigid night as a yet-not- unchained Django (a relentlessly convincing Jamie Foxx, giving his character an undercurrent of cold fury) trudges through the woods with a group of fellow slaves. The company encounters Dr. King Schultz (an endearing Christoph Waltz), an unerringly polite and cheerful German-born bounty hunter, who soon enlists Django to help him hunt down a trio of fugitive scumbags, as he is the only one who can reliably identify them. It's only a matter of time before the pair is cutting a bloody trail through slavers, clansmen, and outlaws, as they journey to reunite Django with his wife Broomhilda (an earnest Kerry Washington). He finds her under the oppressive thumb of the smarmy Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, zealous in his villainy), owner of the lucrative Candyland Plantation. It is here that Waltz and Django plot their most daring ruse, a complex plot to trick Candie into letting them ride off with Broomhilda, with no strings attached. Little do they know, they have an even tougher nut than Candie to crack - his mentoring house slave, Stephen (a bald, almost unrecognizable Samuel Jackson with a creepy, cobra-like menace).
This is meant to be Django's tale, as we see him grow from a shackled slave to trained killer to strategic mastermind, but it becomes clear early on that this isn't Django's story â€“ It is Tarantino's! The godfather of modern gonzo filmmaking addresses American slavery and race relations the same way he has addressed other sensitive issues: by making a boisterously entertaining movie that couldn't be less interested in sensitivity. He wraps the premise of revenge in a cloak of prominent historical injustice, which gives him a certain boundless freedom in adding weight to the payoff of vengeance being served in a manner that is fitting for the antagonists. The film does suffer from a more relaxed style of editing (at 165 minutes) towards the third act, but those are minor quibbles.
Django Unchained is a big, sprawling statement that throws everything at the wall and sees what sticks, which has always been one of the strengths of Quentin Tarantino. It is brazen, audacious and thrilling with every concept it dabbles in, and its actors seem to wander through the director's spaces as if consumed by the joyous implications of his overstated enthusiasm for the material, making it engaging on a visceral level.