Ballsy, Shallow, Blood-Spattered Excellence

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2013)

To the surprise of no one, Django Unchained is an essentially Tarantino love letter to a genre that's been left sadly underutilized over recent decades. It's every bit a straightforward action / revenge picture, with debts owed to the dozens of Leone & company spaghetti westerns that populated theaters in the sixties and seventies. The central plot is thread-bare - several of Pulp Fiction's competing story lines have quite a bit more depth - but surprisingly never really feels like it lingers or oversteps its bounds, even as the runtime approaches three hours. Eyes-forward escapism is the message of the day, and Django scratches that itch with vigor. It's a tale that, despite an egregious body count and a comical amount of gory debauchery, doesn't take itself too seriously and is inexplicably able to draw hearty laughs from moments that would have been downright chilling in another director's hands. The key role players are almost unanimously entertaining; DiCaprio as the smarmy, loathsome plantation owner, Jackson as his savvy right-hand man, Foxx as the blunt instrument of justice... they all play one note, but it's flawlessly tuned. The real show-stealer, once again, is Christoph Waltz, whose grinning, man-of-the-world bounty hunter fuels the majority of the fire. Although his role is a polar opposite to the slimy Nazi turncoat he portrayed in Inglourious Basterds, it's no less memorable and the picture sags noticeably when he isn't on the screen. Tarantino has turned in smarter efforts, carved deeper characters and written sharper dialog, but he's rarely been this indulgently entertaining. I loved the experience, especially in a theaterful of similarly-humored moviegoers, and can't wait to ingest the subtleties on my own when it's released for home viewing.