Violent, stylish, fun and flawed.

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2013)

Although Kill Bill Vol 2 was a western of sorts, this is Tarantino's first full blown attempt at cinema's oldest genre and, in true QT form, he pilfers from every gun-slinging saga that has come before to create a unique entry into the genre. Charting the exploits of freed slave Django (Jamie Foxx) as he tracks down wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), this story doesn't say as much as it thinks – or as much as Quentin proclaimed – about slavery in the mid 18th century, instead offering up a blood-splattering, popcorn-fuelled revenge pic that has a tendency to allow its characters slip into caricatures. In that framework it succeeds, and there are a plethora of vintage-Tarantino sequences that are an absolute joy to watch; not least the montage halfway through featuring an anachronistically awesome hip-hop tune fused with country music. The undebatable highlight of the movie though is Christoph Waltz, dishing up an indelible performance as German dentist-cum-bounty hunter Dr King Schultz. He knows his way around Tarantino's famously verbose dialogue like no-one else and the film suffers ever so slightly whenever he is not on screen. It's too long at 165 minutes, but there's plenty of violent, stylish fun to be had.