Cut Short: Django Unchained (2012)

I do love a bit of Quentin Tarantino. Although, as someone who studied Film Studies, I think I’m contractually obligated to. Nonetheless, I did strangely find myself having little to say about this one. That isn’t because I thought it was bad, just that I thought it wasn’t as good as his other films.

I liked all of the intro and the banter between Christoph Waltz and Jamie Fox, but started to like it less when they hatched the plan to buy Fox’s wife off of her slave owner. Waltz has this elaborate plan to buy slave wrestlers from Leonardo DiCaprio at an absolutely huge price so that he can weasel his way into getting Fox’s wife out of the deal too. But the whole time I was just thinking why not tell DiCaprio the truth? Why not just say ‘here’s an extortionate amount of money for this slave girl I know you own’? They do this whole analogy about why DiCaprio might turn down a deal like that, but after meeting the character I see no reason why he wouldn’t jump at it. I mean $12,000 dollars in olden-days money is a lot more than now-days money, and DiCaprio is very greedy guy who never stops talking about getting his money’s worth out of his slaves – $12,000 seems like enough to me!

Aside from that, however, it is exactly what you’d expect from a Tarantino movie; lot’s of great dialogue, tension and an eventual explosion of ludicrous violence to top it off. And despite my problems with the latter half of the film, it is still nice to see Jamie Fox’s character come into his own as a badass bounty hunter and to see DiCaprio’s get his comeuppance at the hands of Waltz. I really liked Samuel L. Jackson a lot in this one too. He’s in a lot of Tarantino movies with a larger part to play, sure, but I found him particularly good here.

Django Unchained might not be as good as some of Tarantino’s other movies, in my opinion, but it’s still pretty good and worth a watch and I would recommend it.