Incredible.
Over the top.
Best written film of the year.
Quentin Tarantino lives up to my very, very high expectations with the brilliant DJANGO UNCHAINED. He has talked about wanting to make a western for quite some time and whatever gestation period this film had in his mind served it well, as its one of the most exciting, fast moving nearly 3 hour films I've ever seen. Cristoph Waltz stars as Dr. King Schultz, a bounty hunter in Texas masquerading as a dentist, who meets up with Django, a slave with more than one score to settle. Waltz is just as great here as he was in Inglorious Basterds, but there is more humor and joy in this character, allowing him to really shine in his best role to date. The dialogue is spectacular. It's adult, its plastered with profanity and racial epithets, but it's brilliant. No one spins a scene that relies solely on dialogue for suspense the way that QT does and his dinner scene at Candieland (don't worry, you'll get it when you see it) equals the basement bar scene in Basterds for suspense, clever words and delivery. Django is in pursuit of the men who whipped, stole and sold his wife Broomhilda and Waltz soon discovers that he has found a "natural bounty hunter" in Django. Jamie Foxx is really great in the film, baring more than his soul for Tarantino in some brutal scenes, while playing the quiet ones just as deftly. He's damn funny too. Leonardo DiCaprio is the best screen villain in ages, Calvin Candie who is as witty as he is depraved and dangerous. Samuel L. Jackson rounds out the cast in my all time favorite Jackson role as house slave Stephen, who may be much sharper than he appears and delivers more laughs than you can count in the last hour of the film. This is one violent, adult movie. It revels in blood and every shot spouts geysers of plasma in an obvious and highly stylized tribute to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. Tarantino even borrows Leone's favorite composer, Ennio Morricone, to score this film, along with the likes of James Brown, 2 Pac and John Legend. It's beautifully photographed, quickly paced and fun as hell. An early scene with the KKK debating the style of their hoods packs more laughs than most 90 minute comedies, Don Johnson is hilarious as Big Daddy and James Remar, Franco Nero (the original Django!) Tom Wopat and Jonah Hill all shine in small roles. As always with Tarantino, if you are easily offended by extreme violence, profanity, bold nudity, DON'T GO. If you are thrilled by smart dialogue, great heroes, horrible bad guys, explosive action sequences and suspense with a generous splash of laugh out loud comedy, run, don't walk to see DJANGO. It's one of Tarantino's best, one of my 3 favorite films of 2012 and easily in my all-time Top 100. A+
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