The grateful German entrepreneur helps Django learn to shoot, and offers him a job as his bounty hunting partner: ‘It’s like slavery — it’s a cash for flesh business.’
Django replies, with brutal honesty, that he just wants ‘to shoot white folks for money’. There follow more splendid scenes, as the two partners ride as equals into southern towns, causing outrage among the men and fainting fits among the women.
Waltz’s way with words and his ability to hide behind the law are richly enjoyable. He and the deadpan Foxx make a hilarious double-act.
The film starts to falter when it attempts to take a deeper, more emotional turn. Django reveals he has a wife (Kerry Washington) whose German owners taught her German and called her Brunhilde.
She was branded on her face for trying to run away with her husband. The bounty hunters learn she has gone to work for a rich, evil plantation-owner called Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has a taste for black-on-black ‘Mandingo’ all-in wrestling to the death and uses female slaves for his sexual pleasure, as ‘comfort girls’.
The bounty hunters hatch a plan to rescue Django’s wife under the guise of purchasing one of Candie’s fighter-slaves at an absurdly inflated price.
Once inside Candie’s heart of darkness, however, they have to outwit not only the sharp-witted Candie but his chief slave-butler, a memorably malevolent Uncle Tom called Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).
Things do not go as planned, and there is an almighty shoot-out.
A less self-indulgent director would allow the film to end there, but Tarantino lets it ramble on for quite a bit longer, with a spectacularly ill-advised acting cameo by the writer-director, who attempts an accent that’s meant to be Australian but sounds more South African.
As with Peter Jackson’s Hobbit, a film with plenty of high points is allowed to run on for at least half-an-hour too long.
Sequences that drag include the pulling of a slave to bits by dogs, portrayed with a little too much gruesome relish. And several over-extended scenes suffer from the writer-director’s infatuation with his own dialogue, which is a mixture of the delectably archaic and the carelessly anachronistic.
Just as irksome is the obtrusive score, which conspicuously fails to make a harmonious mix of Ennio Morricone Western music, rap, hip-hop and folk.
Tarantino is setting out to mash up four very different genres, two of them familiar: blaxploitation (which he did before in Jackie Brown) and racial revenge action film, previously attempted in Inglourious Basterds.
He mixes these elements with a couple of genres he hasn’t attempted before: pre-Civil War Western and genteel costume drama.
It’s a weird combination, and the second hour, when they all collide, is a bit like watching an exceptionally lurid episode of Downton Abbey interrupted by blood-crazed ninjas. I’ve always admired Tarantino’s flair, and there’s bravery in the way he refers to a subject that few American directors have dared to tackle: the racism of America’s past, and in particular its record on slavery. It’s a lot more fun than Spielberg’s stodgy Amistad.
Sadly, QT’s usual weaknesses are also on display. His love of violence, which in Inglourious Basterds looked like racism against the Germans, is here turned against white people in general.
You have only to consider what audiences would make of a film that enthusiastically praised the ethnic cleansing of black people by whites, to realise there’s a kind of inverse racism going on here.
And Tarantino still isn’t any good at deepening character. The relationship between Django and his wife is fumbled badly.
It’s the relationship between the two bounty hunters that drives the picture, and blatantly the only human contact in which the director is really interested.
