Hope you're reading this, Tarantino...

Rating: 4/10 (10 January 2013)

...because you've lost it. Maybe you've lost the clarity of vision, or perhaps your taste compass is spinning waywardly, leaving you adrift in the doldrums of worn-out pop culture. Dude, if you were out to make a spaghetti western vengeance film - a) you made it too long and the pacing was off, and b) you all but ruined it with your "cool" soundtrack.
Yes, the movie has merits - eye catching cinematography, a few funny lines, etc. But I'm sure you can find others gushing over this stuff elsewhere. I just want to discuss why this movie was made and what's in it for the audience.
Was this a "serious", "high art" film? No. Though Tarantino has been preoccupied with race relations for a long time now, he misses a chance to make any real headway with these themes. The most he has going here is in the way he stocked the film with "collaborators" - slaves who have milked their positions of relative power for all they're worth, achieving some sort of status while oppressing their fellow slaves. The depth this is explored to is questionable and open to various interpretations, but frankly becomes kind of hard to swallow when juxtaposed with the glossy, saturated portrayal of southern high society. So yeah, money and power attracts scummers...yay, we get it! Hardly a poignant, nuanced observation there, though.
If Tarantino was not going for highbrow, he must have been trying to entertain us. Which he could have easily done if he DIDN'T MAKE THE MOVIE THREE HOURS LONG. He could have easily shaved fifteen minutes off the film if he chilled out with the slow-motion. Yes, it's tempting, I know - those top-grossing Hollywood actors just look so darn COOL strutting around in their snazzy costumes, and it's hard not to throw a glamor shot in there every, oh...five minutes or so. A few unnecessary scenes could have been cut. This is an action revenge western, after all! Pacing!! (Which, by the way, really suffers in the anticlimactic final quarter.)
However, the biggest flaw in the film was the music. A hodge-podge of modern, hip genres works well in movies that depict the modern world, with its multitude of sound sources and stylistic variety. An oldie comes on the car radio and swells across the frequencies until it is in its full-spectrum glory. The camera enters the club, and what was at first a low rhythmic rumble becomes a full-blast techno number as the lead character resolutely shoves his way past sweaty people shaking their assets.
None of that needs to be present in a western, yet Tarantino seems not to have budged an inch from his now-formulaic treatment of soundtrack. Which is the most frustrating aspect of this film - everyone knows Tarantino is an obsessive movie nerd, so one would assume he's seen not just the Leone films, not just the American genre classics of the 60s and 70s, and not just all the famous Djangos – but pretty much every Italian (and non-Italian) western of any interest to anyone whatsoever. If so, he should know that the soundtrack is integral to the atmosphere - but the atmosphere itself is sparse and austere like the landscapes, punctuated mostly by silence. The Morricone soundtracks of old, with their hairy surf guitars and weird rattling noises, are what the genre knows and likes. (A comparatively recent example of this done right is Neil Young's hair-raising work on Dead Man.) But Tarantino chose to populate his film with rap fight songs, lyrical pop, and funky overproduced incidental music that belongs more in a hip heist flick where everyone wears clothes costing half your yearly salary - in other words, music that he thinks is "cool".
Which is ultimately the overarching problem with this entire film - the excessive worship of "cool". Many people will harp on the ultra-violent gun splatterings, the exploitation of slavery imagery, and the glamorization of vengeance. But that didn't bother me half as much (or, to be honest, at all) as the lounge scene in the Candyland mansion, with the hip (slave) bartender, fancy clothes, beautiful women, and the ever-present slow motion. If Tarantino truly wanted to make an homage to his favorite ultra-violent spaghetti Westerns, why not actually follow the formula? Sure, he gets the close-up faces right - but by introducing a distracting soundtrack, he completely cuts the ambient tension, which is the only point of showing these people's faces up close in the first place. And don't even get me started on the homage and obscure reference stuff - WAY over the heads of most people, and worst of all, done at the expense of pacing. It's as if, instead saying, "I want it to be like this" or "this belongs here", he asks himself, "how cool would it be if...?"
In short, this is an honest attempt at a genre film made by someone who cannot see a foot past his own ego, even though he suffers tremendously from a variety of doubts and insecurities. You can see fragments of a thousand different westerns reflected here, but none of them add up to anything. You won't miss much if you avoid this one.