Not very funny; violence more than sufficient

Rating: 6/10 (30 December 2012)

It's not that there is no humor; I laughed out loud maybe twice. Very early on, though, it becomes clear that we are supposed to be enthralled (amused? impressed?) by unrealistic gun play and explosive red blots, and that theme continues throughout.
Christoph Waltz clearly enjoyed his role and performs it with relish and a twinkle in his eye. Every time he opened his mouth, I thought "Richard Dreyfuss"--I don't say that is either good nor bad, but to me, it was Waltz playing Dreyfuss playing this role.
Jamie Foxx seemed to take his role too seriously, as the movie does not deserve it, or maybe he just doesn't do comedy well anymore (I seem to remember some funny bits on "In Living Color", but that was long ago.) Samuel Jackson played his role as "house Negro" well, but he didn't do himself much honor by taking it. There were some good cameos, particularly Don Johnson as a slaveowner in Tennessee, and Franco Nero as an Italian owner of a Mandingo fighter in Mississippi. Quentin Tarantino's cameo was ridiculously bad acting; he should refrain from putting himself in future movies.
Leonardo DiCaprio's role as a degenerate slaveowner was generally well portrayed, from a stylistic point of view. I would say his character's dialogue was not particularly well written, but he has no particular cause for complaint, as bad dialogue prevails throughout, except for some ill-fitting attempts at intellectual discourse, which I saw as showy and superficial in such a mindlessly violent exercise. (I suppose the bad dialogue could be said to be intentional, but it earns Tarantino no credit.)
What else? I don't object to the excessive use of the 'n' word, as it probably is realistic for the period. Unlike, say, "Huckleberry Finn", its use doesn't have anything profound to say about slavery except that some slaves would really have liked to kill every white person in sight (not too surprising, probably). The closest to something meaningful was when DiCaprio's character asks the interesting question: "Why do the slaves not kill their masters?" and doesn't answer it. Clearly many of the bad guys deserved what they got, but not all of them, and the script shows little discrimination (so to speak). The plot was tediously predictable, though I do admit I knew the outlines of it before I went in to see it.
Tarantino's use of old-fashioned spaghetti Western titles, Nero, and the song performed in Italian (could get a nomination, if the field is weak enough) was probably his most interesting directorial motif, but it was neither surprising, funny, nor profound.