Django Unchained (2012) * * * 1/2

Adult supervision is required

It's got guts. It's got gore. It's got a theme song.

Django Unchained doesn't want to meet your expectations. It's an epic with half of the action set in one locale. It's a Western transplanted to the South. It's full of sudden gunplay, anachronisms, and Australians in Mississippi.


But it's a Quentin Tarantino film. We expect all these things from him, whether the movie wants us to or not.

I apparently drew Django with an overcoat

Tarantino is adept at providing us with characters who break their stereotypes, making them walking conundrums. The title character, Django (Jamie Foxx) could have been a meek ex-slave who at every moment longs to free his wife and save his people from oppression. But that would be too simple. Instead, as soon as he's unchained he takes on what is essentially an undercover role: a black slave trader who must get inside a plantation and act as if he's not repulsed by everything he sees. This is a job he does well -- very well.

He's joined in his quest by "Dr." King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who presents his own contradictions. Schultz is not afraid to gun down men in front of their sons, but he gets weak-kneed even being in the presence of an immoral institution like slavery. Indeed, one of the most startling scenes of the film is when Django acquiesces to the execution of a slave over the protest of Schultz, all so he can stay undercover. Racial expectations, it must be said, are tossed and flipped like pancakes.

Django's main strength is its acting. Foxx is intense, suave, and manly -- he has almost made a sex symbol out of slave. Although I can't confess to having seen any spaghetti westerns, I can imagine Foxx does well playing a straight-shooting and ruthless character from the mold of that genre. Waltz is a gem, deserving the Oscar in every moment he is onscreen. It must be something in the way he talks--in perfect German-accented English, perpetually optimistic--that so charms me.

I was impressed by the supporting characters in Django, too, though the actors are by no means small-time. Leonardo DiCaprio chews the scenery as Calvin Candie, the plantation owner who is both a Southern gentleman and a sadist (he looks like he's having fun in the role, which is a change from the mopey characters he so regularly plays). Likewise, Samuel L. Jackson is in fine form as the Uncle Tom/House Slave. His role is meant to be both unpleasant and comic, and Jackson exudes both traits with relish.

And the acting goes hand-in-hand with the film's other main strength, its excellent script. Another well-deserved Oscar for Tarantino, who's specialty, I'm learning, is crafting an extremely tense scene before explosive violence. There must be two or three such scenes in this movie: someone is dead by the end of each one. You'll know when they arrive. My heart doesn't usually pound as much as it does during one of these Tarantino-Tension scenes, which is the name I will give them until I think of a better one. That is rare for a filmmaker these days. Equally rare is scripting dialogue that sounds perfect, dialogue that is like an art form unto itself. Witness every time Schultz speaks, for instance. It's like he has an invisible dictionary floating right there before him.

Right in my first review I'm torn. Originally, I was going to give Django three stars because I was put off by how quintessentially Tarantino it is. Contradictory characters: check. Elaborate set-pieces: check. Brutal violence: check and check--at some points I was laughing at how much blood there was. But the writing is so good, and the acting hits every key, that I have to give it that extra boost. Spaghetti westerns have never appealed to me (though as I said, I haven't seen one), and I still enjoy a moral compass in a movie. But there's lots to appreciate in Django, and I can't help but give an extra boost to a film that can make a treasure out of almost every line.