Anyway, we got in at 2 for 1 prices last night and settled in when several massive bags of sweets for near 3 hours of cinema. After one good (mainly cos of Park Chan Wook but also cos of Mia Wasikowska having black hair and that Death in Vegas track being properly haunting) and several terrible trailers the film started with Tarantino's now-trademark throwback open credits. This time we have a 1970s style Columbia pictures logo followed by an intro credits sequence using over-sized red technicolour lettering. Tarantino is certainly an auteur, in that he has a visual style that's instantly recognisable. His use of crash zooms (both in and out) and fast pans sets his films aside from most others that appear in the mainstream. He stays true to his own roots with Django Unchained too. It's a film with a huge amount of bloody violence, but none of it is CGI, digital or necessary. The violence is terrifically visceral and accomplished using traditional special effects, real fake blood spurts and cartridges firing extra-smoky blanks. Basically it looks like a cheesy exploitation gore shocker for the 1970s, which is exactly what all Tarantino's films are supposed to look like.
At its heart, Django Unchained is a revenge fantasy movie made in the style of a Spaghetti Western-cum-exploitation movie. Django (played by Jamie Fox) is an ex-slave who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christophe Waltz) to hunt down and kill wanted men. What Django really wants though, is to be reunited with his wife - who is still toiling under slavery - and on the way kill as many white slavers as possible. The film has some extremely funny scenes, often accompanied by extreme and bloody violence. The film also has a couple of fantastic performances, most notable of all is perhaps Leonardo DiCaprio who seems to revel in playing an unashamedly bad guy - plantation owner Calvin Candie. Fox too puts on a great physical performance, in which he delivers his often minimal dialogue with searing intensity. His character's intense desire to wreak revenge upon the slave-owning population of the south seeps into every action he takes and word he says.
The film is a bit long, and has a false end when it looks like the big climax is coming but then doesn't for another 20 minutes. Tarantino is notorious for having the production company give him his own way, and while that creative freedom generally results in something brilliant happening, it would be nice if he would let a bit of editing on his scripts. Fun though the film is, a 2 hour 45 minutes run time is far too much for what amounts to a collection of prosthetic limbs exploding and Leonardo Dicaprio shouting.
Peter Bradshaw has pointed out in The Guardian how the film is perhaps the only mainstream Western ever to tackle the subject of slavery in the USA head on. Many Western films are set during an era and in a place where slavery and cruelty towards black people was at its height, but that this is rarely overtly shown. Django Unchained might have no historical accuracy whatsoever as far as its plot goes, but its depiction of the terror of slavery on an industrial scale in rural Mississippi in the 1850s is no doubt close to the mark. Tarantino hasn't only righted a historical oversight of the Western genre, he has turned it full circle and thrown it in everyone's faces in all its despicable horror, all the while making a hideously gruesome and entertaining shock genre action movie. Django Unchained is a very good film, probably Tarantino's best since Jackie Brown.
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