Over the holidays this year, the only film anyone was talking about was Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Being a Tarantino film, this movie had a lot of hype surrounding it, and the all-star cast had people really excited to see this one, so just how the hell was it?
The film starts off with Django, among other slaves, shackled up and being led around by angry white men when a strange, German "dentist" comes along, kills the white men, and takes Django to help him as a bounty hunter. As time goes on, you find out about Django's wife, Broomhilda, and why Django has to rescue her.
Now, before I start to really get into this review, it should be known that I did, in fact, like this movie. It had a good story and was, unsurprisingly, very well acted.
However, there were a lot of things I did not like about the film.
The first thing is the overall feel of this movie. When you watch Pulp Fiction, or Kill Bill, you know that you're watching a Tarantino movie. It's a little hard to pinpoint, but something about the film feels like Tarantino created it, his fingerprints are all over everything you see. This was an aspect that I felt Django was missing. Other than some scrolling text and 60's/70's-esque zoom-ins, the film was missing that old school, exploitation feel. It felt like a big-budget, star-studded feature instead of a gritty Tarantino film. When I heard that Quentin Tarantino was directing a film about a black bounty hunter in the American south, I could not wait to see a spaghetti-western-meets-blaxploitation blood bath that could maybe even popularize the western genre again, but that simply wasn't the case. The film had tons, and tons of blood, plenty of western music and tons of gunplay, but it still just wasn't Tarantino enough.
The second issue with the film was the pacing. Under normal circumstances, Quentin Tarantino could write an hour-long conversation between people in a grocery store and keep an audience entertained, but there were certain scenes in Django Unchained where I almost wished I could hit the fast-forward button and get it over with. Without spoiling anything, there was a particular dinner-table scene that was so slow it was nearly unwatchable. The overall structure of the film was very, very slow. Most of the especially long scenes did result in a nice, violent pay off, so it's not totally unwatchable, but it was a bit hard.
Despite these past few issues, there were plenty of things I did enjoy about the film. The gunplay and fight scenes were exceptional, and the character Django was extremely likable and very, very cool, and the soundtrack kicked ass. If someone else had directed this film, I would have a much better attitude towards it, but with someone like Tarantino, there are certain expectations that come along with the name, and Django Unchained just didn't live up to them. I give the film 3 out of 5 framed pictures of Ricky Smith.
No comments:
Post a Comment