That's another genre ticked off.

Rating: 7/10 (15 January 2013)

Quentin Tarantino has been plundering cult cinema for over twenty years now, with varying degrees of success. Django Unchained sees the director turning to the Spaghetti Western for inspiration, borrowing film-making techniques from the greats of the genre (most notably Sergios Leone and Corbucci) while adding his own trademark touches—snappy banter and over-the-top violence. The result is something of a mixed bag—some of it works brilliantly, much of it is unremarkable yet still entertaining, and some of it is embarrassingly bad. Fortunately, the positives outweigh the negatives, the overall result being far from Tarantino's best work, but a long way from his worst as well.
The good points include a decent soundtrack (something that QT has always managed to get right), excellent performances from the film's primary cast members (Christoph Waltz putting in a particularly good turn as bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz), a decent supporting cast that includes both big name actors and cult favourites, lots of very brutal violence, and a few well executed action scenes, the film's highlight being a brilliantly choreographed and extremely gory shootout between Django and numerous soon-to-be-dead gun-toting bad guys, the equivalent of Kill Bill's blood drenched Crazy 88s fight (it's such an exhilarating scene it makes one wonder why QT didn't cut some of the jibber-jabber and devote more of the running time to action).
Of the more woeful content, we get a supposedly humorous exchange between various members of a hooded raid party that is painfully unfunny, the expected cameo performance by QT (as a slave-driver) which is up to his usual low standard, far too much 'filler' (the film could have been shorter: it doesn't feel epic enough to warrant such a long running time), and a finale that, although explosive, still comes as something of a disappointment after the aforementioned shootout scene.