Django Unchained (2012)

"For every man who's not free, we're all guilty."

Django is not unchained. The translation is wrong because it brings to mind a character who is out of control. Instead, in this film, Django is literally just "unchained" and nothing else more. Although the ratio of the chains he wears to the other chains that keep him prisoner seems to be clearly in favor of the latter, Django is only unchained by the act of his savior at the beginning of the film, in the sense of being liberated from slavery (which first happens formally and then technically). The last feature film by self-taught director Quentin Tarantino speaks in the language he has already accustomed us to with slavery, persecution, oppression, and the need to correct these injustices; an older need of the author, which in Inglourious Basterds fought the horrors of Nazism for more or less the same reasons.

This time, however, Tarantino takes the spectator as his accomplice because each of the crimes committed by Django and his liberator, a bounty hunter named Dr. Schultz (an exemplarily composed character by Christoph Waltz), has sound reasons, is perfectly legal, and gives the feeling of restoring the morality-based equity. As for the plot? Well, Django (a character taken from another film, here a fugitive black man) ends up getting paid to shoot whites. A job that he loves: both lucrative and satisfying. His only concern is to save his wife (yes, friends, there are such fools; admittedly, only in movies), which he does, dragging along a whirlwind of future deceased, including the other main characters of the story (...I really felt sorry for Leonardo DiCaprio). In a film that critics have labeled as somewhat more mature, since for the first time in Quentin's career, one can observe a careful concern for the image, as well as for the procedures that allude to spaghetti western and blaxploitation films (themes to which a real tribute is paid here), we can discern too many quotes from his own style, accompanied by an obvious blunting of the overflowing creativity of Pulp Fiction.

A film worth seeing... not just because it helps you have opinions in high society...but because it is one of the few movies where DiCaprio appears as the bad guy, and makes a stunning performance. Samuel L Jackson as Steven was outstanding and I was very much surprised when he didn't get an academy award nomination for his role. Jamie Foxx as Django was also very good in the role of the fastest gun in the South but it was Christoph Waltz who stole the whole damn show as sweet-talking German dentist turned bounty hunter.

Is also, frankly, just too damn long. Or rather, its story is just too damn short for the running script time. But Tarantino has his ways of letting a scene run, run and run until we are sometimes wondering what the hell is going around. And yes it could have moved faster without harming the quality of the entire production. But it's good to see it anyway... even for the scenes of carnage, with blood flowing in waves and spurting in true jets, fusillades with dozens of corpses (...in short, Tarantino's usual stuff...), if not for the pushing of the savagery of slavery to the forefront. Strong action and comedy elements will attract a good-sized audience but some might object to the writer-directors tone and historical liberties. The film’s greatest problem is that, especially in the second half, the Django character gets a bit lost...In a few words, we have fine acting and insinuation to build genuine menace and tension.