Very good, but a little short of being a masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2013)

I went to see this after weighing up a number of reviews from different sources. I can only say I wasn't disappointed, but despite the film's strengths it has one major weakness. I'll try to outline these without spoilers.
Strengths: (1) Outstanding performances from Leonardo Dicaprio, Samuel L. Jackson (both a big surprise as baddies and proving the versatility of these actors), plus Christoph Waltz was the most engaging character in the film, and Jamie Foxx was very good too. (2) Some excellent set- piece scenes, especially in the first half - the scene where Schultz meets Django is hilarious. (3) Also surprisingly, a really, really earnest attempt by Tarantino to grapple with the slavery issue on a visceral level. To criticize him for his use of the 'n' word and excessive violence is to miss the point. This is what slavery was like: nasty, brutal and racist. The film depicts the horror of slavery in all its repellent detail, and should be commended for this, not criticized.
Weakness: Only one, but it's a biggie. The last part of the film, from the conclusive interaction between Dicaprio and Waltz onwards, lost me emotionally, where I had been very involved up to that point. After this it became cartoonish (perhaps deliberately?) and instead of the ending being moving it just felt empty. The scene with the Australians, for example, was just silly, not believable, and not even funny at all. That Django was even in that position after what he had done not long before was ridiculous. Although Tarantino has cleverly avoided falling into cliché, I don't think the resolutions he came up with were convincing in terms of some of the characters' motivations. There were other options, which one can identify simply through memory of several Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. The outcome could be the same, but the method of arriving at it needed to be more believable.
I think, like so many directors and writers, Tarantino has struggled to get the ending right. Despite many claiming that the film is too long, I think in the end Tarantino actually needed to develop the denouement at greater length and more satisfactorily for it to have any emotional or intellectual bite. Kill Bill 2 suffered severely from similar problems.
Overall, then, a very worthy attempt at a revival of the spaghetti western (one of my favourite genres), but the script would have needed a redraft in the last third.