User Reviews

After all the hype, all the articles and reviews, after all the controversy over the 'n' word, after all is said and done, Tarantino kicks butt again and comes up with a terrifically entertaining movie. Notice I said entertaining and not necessarily enjoyable. There are a number of scenes that are clearly not enjoyable, in fact, downright troubling like the dog attack of the black slave D'Artagnan (Ato Essandoh) and the hot box scene involving Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). But over all, Tarantino has fashioned a well told revenge tale modeled on the Spaghetti Western genre of the Seventies. And it begins immediately with a classy credit for the 'friendly participation of Franco Nero', the original coffin dragging gunslinger from the 1966 film who's name is resurrected here because frankly, it just sounds really cool.

Now here's the problem I have with folks who find racism around every corner - when a movie depicts events or themes that have racism at it's core, it doesn't mean that the picture or the film maker is racist or is making a racist statement. The entire controversy in the media surrounding the use of the 'n' word here is a prime example of critiquing the movie as a racist film. Personally, whenever I heard it used in the picture, it sounded to me like part of the era's vernacular and not as a pretext for sensationalism. So here's a question I have for the critics - when will you put Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson on the spot for their participation in the project? Are they being racist, or are they artists? Or is it only Quentin who has to answer for the film's language and subject matter?

What I didn't expect from the movie was the amount of humor and comedic dialog that came along with it. The bag head scene was surreally comic and just mind blowingly funny, but you really have to listen to the dialog to get it. The guy who was upset over the critique of his wife's working on the hoods was something one could easily relate to, and yet it sounded completely ludicrous even in context. I guess you have to be a little warped to come up with something like that, but warped seems to be right up Tarantino's alley. He proves it once and for all when he has Django blow himself sky high with the bag of dynamite. Priceless.

As for the violence, well it's red meat bloody and about as visceral as it gets, so if you're on the squeamish side, there are a few scenes that may give you the heaves. It's one area where the director explicitly goes over the top and much of it is quite unbelievable. I have to admit though, the 'say goodbye' scene with Miss Lara Lee (Laura Cayouette) was the best, and it wasn't bloody at all. That was one of the times the picture entered 'Kill Bill' territory.

As for a recommendation, you'll just have to guage your own preferences. I'm a Western movie and Tarantino fan and there was no way I was going to miss this. Casual movie goers with a low tolerance for gore and gratuitous shoot 'em up scenes should most likely stay away. Finally, for those hung up about the media's fascination with the 'n' word, I tried keeping up with the count as the picture progressed. I've read accounts that placed the number at well over a hundred, but I came up with seventy seven myself, realizing that I probably missed a few because it's easy to have your attention diverted by other elements in the story. No reason we can't get a recount with captioning on the DVD when it comes out.

For anyone who isn't much into cinema, I would recommend watching Django Unchained and you will fall in love with films forever.

This film is a classic western full of drama, suspense and tension with a tremendously unpredictable plot but with a sense of realism taken into consideration.

I believe it would be hard to dislike this masterpiece as it has it all: action, adventure and even a sense of romance and the occasional humour.

Great direction, screenplay, performances, soundtrack, cinematography, costume design, production design, all the things you can expect from a Tarantino film.

Also like others Tarantino films, only those who really have a extensive knowledge of films are going to really appreciate some things, like the Franco Nero scene.

Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a well spoken bounty hunter who acquires Django (Jamie Foxx) to find and kill some men who are wanted, "dead or alive." Dr. Schultz isn't too keen on the "live" part.

The film divides itself into two parts. After the bounty hunting episodes are through, our duo conceive a plan to rescue the wife of Django (Kerry Washington) by purchasing her from Candie Land plantation. Dr. Schultz has no stomach for slavery or slave owners. Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't enter the film until the second part.

Like Tarantino films it incorporates humor. The bag over the head scene was reminiscent of something we might have seen in "Blazing Saddles." The flashbacks are minimal and not confusing. There is of course the over the top climatic ending and plenty of blood.

I have to question the use of the MF bomb several times in this picture. The first know usage of the word is the 1930s. It is speculated the phrase originated during slavery as a way to describe white owners who would take black mothers as comfort women. The phrase would of had a specific meaning and not used in the generic sense that Samuel L. Jackson tossed about.

Tarantino fans will not be disappointed. Great sound track.

Parental Guidance: F-bomb,N-word, nudity (Kerry Washington). No sex. Killing and slow motion blood splatter.

Merry Christmas to all you Tarantino fans out there. I hope you made a Tarantino checklist so here we go.

Witty dialogue, check. Excessive profanity especially use the word 'nigger', check. Excessive violence including testicles getting blown off, check. Soulful musical score, check. Sometimes non-linear narrative, check. Shots of women's feet, check. Very great character driven plot, check. An actual spaghetti western, even though it takes place in the American South, check.

There are four standout characters played by the top billed actors.

Jamie Foxx plays Django, a freed slave who becomes a bounty hunter. Even though he is the titular character, he gets downplayed when in the presence of the other actors. Still he delivers a solid performance, in fact hes very convincing. We all know Jamie Foxx as this golden voice RnB singer and comedian with a very clean cut image. He was able to pull off the whole transitioning from a timid slave to a menacing bounty hunter. Not only that he had the whole look down too, with all the facial scarring and the messy hair.

Christoph Waltz plays Dr. King Schulz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter who frees Django so he could help pursue his previous owners who are targets. Waltz is a very charismatic actor, and thats how he does this role. Presents every line with finesse.

Leonardo Dicaprio is in his best yet. He plays a plantation owner, Calvin Candie, and is the owner of Django's wife. This is a very different role. We've seen Leonardo in gritty roles before but never did he play this lecherous antagonist. We were all used to Leo being this teen idol, who looked like a member of Hanson. Here he's this Southerner with discoloured teeth and a scruffy beard.

Finally Samuel L. Jackson who plays Steve, a house slave who you could say is the secret antagonist here. For all the screen time that he has he dominates. Sam usually plays boisterous roles as a tough guy, but it was very interesting seeing him play a devious and manipulative old man.

The only gripe here was that this film was a little too long exceeding the three act structure, but its an epic western film so I'll excuse Tarantino for that. Yet again he made another great film with a lot of flair and carried well by the four big hitter actors. Well done Mr. Tarantino.

I'm fascinated by spaghetti westerns. How can Italian directors, many of whom never set foot on American soil, reinvent an entirely foreign genre, that of the Western? How can they take the basics of the John Wayne-style cowboy film and transform it into a world with no morality?

All Italian Westerns owe a debt to the films of Sergio Leone. A Fistful of Dollars liberally borrows - steals - from Akita Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Its hero doesn't fight the two gangs in the film one on one in honor bound High Noon-style duels. Instead, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name uses treachery and deceit to defeat both gangs, which depend on their terrorism of the populace to keep their position. Leone would move past simply remaking other films toward creating his own movies that were ripe for being ripped off.

After Leone, arguably the best Italian Westerns came from Sergio Corbucci. The same director who'd go on to direct Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedies like Super Fuzz was really known for some of the most brutal and violent films in the world, which is saying something, as the Italians do love their blood and gore.

His main hero Django, who first appeared in 1966's Django. The character's name is a joke based on the guitarist Django Reinhardt's ability to play guitar despite not being able to use two of his fingers. In the film, the villains destroy Django's hands before he rises up to take them all out. According to Ruggero Deodato, the assistant director of the film, Corbucci also borrowed the idea of a protagonist who dragged a coffin filled with gold and weapons behind him from a comic book that he had read.

There would be over thirty sequels to this film, many of which were completely unofficial and many of whom have nothing to do with Django at all, including One Damned Day at Dawn...Django Meets Sartana! Nero would only reprise the role once in 1987's Django Strikes Again, the only official sequel, which was produced with Corbucci's involvement.

Throughout the films of Quentin Tarantino, the shadow of Sergio Corbucci looms. In his very first movie, Reservoir Dogs, the scene where Mr. Blonde slices the ear of Nash the cop is completely indebted to Hugo performing the same gory attack to Brother Johnathan. At the end of Kill Bill, Tarantino had a Rest In Peace notice for those actors and directors he saw as his most important influences: Charles Bronson, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Leone, Cheng Cheh, Lo Lieh, Lee Van Cleef, Willian Witney and, of course, Corbucci.

Never has that influence been deeper than in this film, an indirect remake and remix of the Spaghetti Western, now back in American hands.

In 2007, Tarantino said that he wanted to create a movie that dealt with America's sinful past, but not in a message movie. Instead, he wanted to make "genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to." He went on to explain that after starting to write a book about Corbucci, he was intrigued by how his films offered an evil and horrible version of America.

There are also allusions to the films Mandingo and the snow scenes of Corbucci's The Great Silence. Even the title itself alludes to the American title of another Corbucci film, Hercules Unchained.

The movie begins in Texas in the middle of the 1800s. Ace and Dicky Speck (James Remar and James Russo) are driving black slaves on foot toward an unknown destination. One of them is Django (Jamie Foxx), who has been separated from his wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington), a house slave raised to speak German and English.

Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist/bounty hunter, soon arrives and offers to buy Django to gain his knowledge over three men he has a warrant to bring in dead or alive. Ace tries to shoot him, but Schultz easily kills him and shoots Dicky's horse, leaving him trapped and at the mercy of his now freed slaves.

Schultz isn't another slaver. Instead, he offers Django a chance to be a free man and teaches him the career of being a bounty hunter. He's a natural - he's able to pull off incredibly complicated shots with all manner of weapons. As they track the Brittle brothers, they make their way to the plantation of Spencer "Big Daddy" Bennett (Don Johnson). While the two men talk, Django finds two of the brothers - Big John and Lil Raj - whipped a slave. As he remembers them doing the same to him, he flies into a rage and murders the two men. The third brother runs but is easily stopped by Schultz.

Later that night, Bennett and the local Klan raid the campsite of our heroes, but a combination of poorly made hoods, explosives and skill allow Django and Schultz to escape. Afterward, Schultz relates the German tale of Siegfried and his epic rescue of Broomhilda. Realizing that he has at last met a real hero, Schultz feels honor-bound to help Django reunite with his wife.

Some months later, Django and Schultz travel to Mississippi and the Candyland plantation, whose owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) now keeps Django's wife. Schultz and Django meet Calvin at a gentleman's club where he stages Mandingo fights and attempts to buy one of his fighters, which is all a ruse so that they may purchase Broomhilda.

Over dinner, Schultz offers to buy her as his escort. This makes Calvin's loyal house slave Stephen (Samuel Jackson) suspicious, so the villain changes the deal so that they don't get the fighter, but only the woman. He thinks he's won, when truly our heroes have exactly what they've come for. However, he can't stop lording over Schultz and continually demands that they shake hands. A shootout ensues, with Schultz killing Calvin, Calvin's bodyguard Butch (also James Remar) killing Schultz and Django killing, well, everybody.

However, our hero can't stop everybody and is captured, with Stephen forcing his surrender by threatening Broomhilda. Django is nearly castrated by Billy Crash before being sold to the Australian-owned LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, who will soon work him to death.

Django soon turns the tables on the mining company's escorts, played by Tarantino, Michael Parks and John Jaratt (Mick Taylor from the Wolf Creek films). He returns to claim Broomhilda's freedom papers from Schultz's corpse, kills every single one of Calvin's slave trackers (Zoe Bell, Michael Bowen, Robert Carradine, Jake Garber, Ted Neeley, James Parks and Tom Savini play the trackers at various points in the film) and then enters Calvin's mansion, where he murders everyone else as they return from the funeral. He saves Stephen for last, shooting him in the kneecaps so that he can't escape the house exploding as our hero rides into the sunset with his wife, or as happens in The Ring of the Nibelung, they renounce the world of the gods and together, they hail light-bringing love and laughing death.

Spike Lee said he would not see the film, saying, "American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a Holocaust. My ancestors are slaves stolen from Africa. I will honor them."

Samuel Jackson again defended Tarantino, replying to Vogue Male that "Django Unchained was a harder and more detailed exploration of what the slavery experience was than 12 Years a Slave, but director Steve McQueen is an artist and since he's respected for making supposedly art films, it's held in higher esteem than Django, because that was basically a blaxploitation movie."

Since this is a Tarantino film, there are plenty of references to movies within and without the universe of his films. Django and his wife are meant to be the great-great-great-grandparents of the character John Shaft. And of course, Franco Nero shows up in a cameo role that made me raise my arms in triumph. When Tarantino first met him, he astonished the actor by knowing all of the dialogue and words to the songs from his films.

There are also appearances by Dukes of Hazzard star Tom Wopat as U.S. Marshall Gill Tatum, Russ and Amber Tamblyn as Son of and Daughter of the Son of a Gunfighter, Bruce Dern, Jonah Hill and Lee Horsely - from The Sword and the Sorcerer - as Sherrif Gus.

Happily, this film isn't the end of the story. A comic book sequel to the film, Django/Zorro, is supposedly going to be made into a film. Tarantino has also discussed plans to turn the movie into a longer mini-series, as well as a series of novels. One of those planned novels, Django In White Hell, eventually became The Hateful Eight.

I enjoyed this action/comedy movie because I hated the evil doers and wanted to see them die because of their brutal natures. I reveled in their pain. And that's the problem.

I'm going along about half way on this one because the performances are as good as they are and I can appreciate Quentin Tarantino's collegial sense of humor. Two "Django's" shaking hands. Brunhilde and Siegfried coming out of nowhere. A musical score that is an homage to Ennio Morricone. The surprises that pop out of a man's mouth or his sleeve.

Tarantino's earlier stuff was pretty good -- "Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction" -- and "Jackie Brown" was finely written and directed, a very nice piece of work. The "Kill Bills" was far too stylized for me.

"Inglourious Basterds" was a disappointment. It was much more violent than anything else he's done, and instead of comic internal conflicts, he'd chosen as villains the Nazis, the most evil people of the century, and their torture and murder could be endorsed without chagrin by the least sophisticated of us, the kind who think "Don't just kill the enemy; torture them before killing them." It was a kind of pornography for the millions.

He's followed the same course here and I didn't like it much. Given the depraved character of the slave-owning Southerners, no punishment is too harsh, so Django can kill helpless and unarmed people -- including women -- at will. As a hero, the character of Django is not just flawed but practically turned inside out. Superman was a hero Roy Rogers was a hero. Django was a walking abattoir, savagely killing everyone he disliked -- and Tarantino has provided him with a the simple-minded excuse of hating that "peculiar institution." I don't want him as my hero. He's too Old Testament for me.

The performances are good, though, and the production values high. Jamie Foxx has about two notes on his instrument but Christoph Waltz does a great job as the German bounty hunter. His accent doesn't sound German at all. It sounds like it came from somewhere in outer space. And Don Johnson is surprisingly chipper and colorful as Big Daddy, the plantation owner who gets splashily offed by Django's powerful rifle. (The squibbs seem to have had double charges.) Tarantino obviously has a lot of talent and a keen sense of humor. I wish he'd get back to his roots and lay off the easy targets.