Virag's Movie Reviews: Django Unchained (2012)

Jackie Brown must have been incredibly stressful for Quentin Tarantino.  After his first two films, he finally went all out to make an actual movie, a good movie with the sort of structure that makes character development and the ability to tell a story very important.  Jackie Brown was a fantastic film.  After that though, Tarantino pretty much gave up and started making silly homage exercises, entertaining but ultimately pretty lightweight.  Django Unchained continued that tradition.  It is little more than a hyper-violent live-action cartoon in the tradition of the Tasmanian Devil and the Road Runner.  The hilarious and completely unrealistic orgy of violence made the slavery setting more than a little incongruous.  You can't overthink Tarantino.  He's not putting that much effort into it.  He just wants to make a cool-looking comedy flick that shows off his film nerd bona fides.  He's the ultimate movie dope, or at least slacker.  He has no larger point to make, so why would you get all bent?  It's not worth it.  Django Unchained, while way too long, was a fun flick that made almost as much sense as Blazing Saddles.  Christoph Waltz had a fucking blast--you could tell; Tarantino should make a series of movies with Waltz and Jamie Foxx going around and shooting people.  The secondary cast was wicked cool, too.  Dennis Christopher.  It's too bad that Shane Vendrell wasn't given more to do.  Sonny Crockett may have been enjoying himself a bit too much.  And certainly Samuel L. deserves a special recognition for so convincingly bringing his vision of Clarance Thomas to the screen the way he did. In the end, DU was too much like all of Tarantino's previous work since Jackie Brown: fun and entertaining but ultimately so much less than it could have been and unsatisfying compared to his best.