Entertaining if a little long

Rating: 7/10 (17 January 2013)

There are some plot holes, as always with Tarantino but very enjoyable. It could have done with being 20 mins shorter and is drawn out in parts but some shots are spectacular in their execution. It's not his best work but not many works from anyone reach those heights. Tarantino shoves everything like this under your nose. Only he and Jackson could possibly have got away with that Stephen character: it is genuinely gasp-inducing. Slavery is a subject on which modern Hollywood is traditionally nervous, a reticence amounting almost to a conspiracy of silence – except, of course, in the explicit context of abolition. Good as they are, Foxx, DiCaprio, Waltz and Washington are utterly upstaged by Samuel L Jackson, who gives an extraordinary performance as Stephen, Candie's household attendant, an Uncle Tom figure utterly and aggressively loyal to the white master, with a deathly stare, a disturbing, Parkinson's-type tremor and a habit of dropping the N-bomb more aggressively than anyone else (and heaven knows everyone is dropping it pretty aggressively).