isappointing (the D is silent)

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2013)

Many of us have grown up with Tarantino and in this film as others we can see he does some things well but in other areas he has not made any progress.
He is excellent at creating scenes of tension, in setting up a story where we see the main players with their conflicting interests and a genuine sense of tension. He did it back in Reservoir Dogs with an undercover cop, in Inglourious Basterds with a Jew-sheltering farmer and performs the same feat again in Django Unchained. What we have right up until the big reveal is a very good movie with a varied cast of individuals each with their own motivations. Lovely. But then it looks like Tarantino cannot get out of the knot he has tied himself. Maybe because he works alone he doesn't have the option of going to other scriptwriters to help him, and maybe there is no-one in the Tarantino camp who can be honest enough with him to tell him when it's not good enough, but right at the moment that Christoph Waltz shoots Leonardo Di Caprio the whole film falls apart.
It is almost as if Tarantino is saying "I can't think of a way out of this, I can't be bothered to work at an answer so here is an implausible gore-fest shootout to close the film."
The first half of the film is an 8, the second half is a 4. Quentin you need to get some people around you who are not in awe of you to the extent they can't tell you when bad is bad.