Django Unchained: Directed by Quentin Tarantino

David Watson

doi:10.3399/bjgp13X664379

Set in America’s Deep South 2 years before the Civil War, German former dentist turned bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) purchases the slave Django (Jamie Foxx). Schultz is after a trio of outlaws, the notorious Brittle brothers, and only Django can identify them. In return for fingering the brothers Schultz offers Django his freedom and trains him as a bounty hunter, taking him on as his partner.

Together the two men spend the winter collecting bounties before setting out to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of moustache-twirling villain Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), owner of the infamous Candyland plantation, where he trains male slaves as ‘mandingo’ fighters for vicious human cockfights while prostituting the female slaves. When Django and Schultz infiltrate Candyland under false pretences however, they arouse the suspicions of Candie’s duplicitous house-slave Stephen (Samuel L Jackson) setting in motion a spiral of violence that ends in a bloody showdown.

There’s a scene near the start of Mel Brooks’ gut-busting 1974 comedy Western Blazing Saddles when the railroad foreman, Taggart (veteran character actor Slim Pickens), informs his henchman, Lyle (Burton Gilliam), that there may be quicksand ahead. When Lyle offers to send a team of horses ahead to test the ground, Taggart smacks him upside the head saying: ‘Horses? We can’t afford to lose any horses, you dummy! Send over a couple of n*****s’.

It’s a throwaway moment of angry eloquence that, in one scene, lays bare over two centuries of American racism, illuminating a brutally stark, uncomfortable truth; that the Land of the Free was built on oppression. In the context of the film, it’s also shockingly funny. With his gory, cartoonishly violent reimagining of Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s greatest magpie, loudly makes the same point for two and three quarter hours (um, racism and slavery bad!) while homaging (STEALING!) scenes here and there from his favourite Spaghetti Westerns and trying to set a Guinness World Record for use of the ‘N-word’.

Funny and profane, packed full of entertaining cameos (Don Johnson and Jonah Hill as ineffectual Klansmen, original Django, Franco Nero) and awash with blood, the resulting collage may just be Tarantino’s best film in years (certainly since Kill Bill: Vol 1) even if does feel at times like you’re watching Sam Peckinpah’s Blazing Saddles.