Tarantino's Uncompromising views about race relations in a period setting.

Rating: 8/10 (14 March 2016)

Quentin Tarantino again displays his propensity for cinematic storytelling with Django Unchained, an engrossing and bloody epic that establishes new credentials for Tarentino in the fact that he utilizes a period setting and the fact that he actually tells his story mostly in sequential order, but manages to keep the viewer riveted to the screen completely to an extremely satisfying conclusion.
Set in pre-Civil War Texas, the story follows a dentist turned bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) who purchases a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx), ensuring his freedom in exchange for his help in getting to his former employers, who are Schultz' latest bounty. This leads to a partnership where Schultz trains Django in the art of bounty hunting and eventually agrees to help Django retrieve his wife(Kerry Washington), who is still the slave of a wealthy plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is obsessed with Mandingo slaves, slaves who are purchased in order to fight each other to the death purely for the white man's entertainment.
In addition to the unaccustomed period setting for Tarantino, this film even took a politically sensitive subject like slavery and put a twist on it by providing an insightful look into the difference between the slave and the black man who wasn't a slave. It was rather unsettling to see Django not really interested in helping the slaves he encounters and the resentment that the slaves seem to have for a black man who is actually free which, sadly, rang true. And even though the film does have a period setting, it does provide the accustomed losers, wannabes, and scumbags that we expect from a Tarantino movie.
As always, Tarantino's casting is on the money, led by Waltz, who won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his charismatic and strikingly original King Schultz, Foxx's quiet intensity as the title character and DiCaprio, who has rarely been better in a very unsympathetic role. Mention should also be made of Samuel L. Jackson, who scores as DiCaprio's house man, a character you like one minute and hate the next. All of the actors somehow tap into the tongue in cheek aspect of Tarantino's Oscar winning screenplay in a way that keep the viewer riveted to the screen and not feeling the film's near three- hour length at all.
Tarantino's direction is just as compelling as his screenplay. His eye for cinematic carnage is startling...there is some inventive camera work here that includes a unique use of slow motion and the art of the zoom. His offbeat song score simultaneously conjures images of Sergio Leone and Tupac Shakur.
Tarantino fans should eat this up and for those who are not, you might want to consider this slightly more traditional story, told with the accustomed Tarantino cinematic panache, that is right up there with Scorsese.