Ok....before I get to the bouquets, and there are plenty, lets get the brickbats, my gripes out in the open.
Firstly the music score. Mostly its great and fits, but for some reason there are a couple of cheezy 70s type songs in there, and one rap song. Why? They don't fit Quentin, and clash with the rest of the genre appropriate western music.
Second face it Quentin. You are a director who is also a writer, and you are a master of dialogue...but sometimes it got too over wordy and long, with some scenes dragged out to wafer thin. Less chatter, more splatter. And why the hell you can make this 2 1/2 hrs full of words, yet stood by while your pet lapdog Eli Roth sliced the action packed MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS down to a skeleton just beggars belief.
And finally, the biggest baddest western fanboy film buff gripe of all. Why Django? Django is a spaghetti western icon - the sullen messed up Union cavalry officer who drags a coffin on chains behind him, a coffin containing a gatling gun. This character has nothing at all to do with that one. You could have equally called it The Good, The Bad and The Unchained, or Wild Wild Unchained, or.... even better.... how about just UNCHAINED? And having Franco Nero (the actor most associated with Django) in as a cameo does not excuse blatant and serious franchise abuse mate!
Anyway....bad stuff aside, this is a top class Quentin Does Spaghetti Western wonder to watch. Brilliantly filmed, with some classic shoot em ups interspersed with some classic dialogue. Christophe Ganz and Jamie Fox make two excellent leads, and DiCaprio is a top class bad guy. The look is right, the feel is right, and for western fans its a must see. Bloody and beautiful like all Quentin flicks, it stands nobly side by side with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and all the rest.
Ganz plays a white bounty hunter who acquires the black slave Django to help him track down three particularly nasty bad boys. After the killing is done he sets Django free and makes him an offer. Help him out and he will return the favor and help Django get his wife back from the bad slave owning Southerner who bought her. So the partnership begins, the bullets fly, and the bad boys drop like flies.....
So.... out and about in pretty good quality DVDSCR formats here and there, not too hard to find, and well well worth a watch. Despite the minor grumbles it does get a solid three cheers from me, and a hot recc for a long night in.
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