movie review django unchained

Faster, Quentin! Thrill! Thrill!

Rating: Four stars

Consider now the curious character of Dr. King Schultz. He is an itinerant dentist who works from his little wagon, traveling the backroads of the pre-Civil War South. As Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” opens, we see a line of shackled slaves being led through what I must describe as a deep, dark forest, because those are the kinds of forests we meet in fairy tales. Out of this deepness and darkness, Schultz ( Christoph Waltz ) appears, his lantern swinging from his wagon, which has a bobbling tooth on its roof.

1/8/13: I added material involving Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson . For the record: My star rating would be: Four stars. Yes, had I not been prevented from seeing it sooner because of an injury, this would have been on my year’s best films list,

Schultz explains himself with the elaborate formality he will use all through the film. He has reason to believe one of the slaves might be of interest to him. This is the slave named Django ( Jamie Foxx ). He enters into negotiations to purchase Django, who he has reason to believe may help him in finding the Brittle brothers, for reasons involving the doctor’s late wife.

And already Tarantino has us, and it’s off to the races. The film offers one sensational sequence after another, all set around these two intriguing characters who seem opposites but share pragmatic, financial and personal issues. We never look back. Maybe it’s just as well.

But now I must ask, before the plot hurtles ahead: Does it strike you as strange that Dr. King Schultz, in all of the vastness of the South, should have been driving his wagon through just that very deep, dark forest where Django was being led? How could he have even known about that? How odd that the path of the wagon and the slaves, which should have sailed past one another like two ships in the night, should meet head to head?

Let us leave Dr. Schultz engaging in one of his several financial transactions during the film, fueled by a generous supply of cash. Let us explain him. He is a wizard from a fairy tale, a man capable of knowing about people’s lives, steering their fates, seducing them into situations in which they receive the destinies they deserve. Although there is a great deal of the realistic in “Django Unchained,” including brutal violence, King Schultz is not real in the same way as the rest.

I require the term deus ex machina . I apologize to my many readers who already know it. A “deus,” for those few who may not, is a person or device in a story that appears from out of the blue and has a solution to offer. I quote Wikipedia: “The Latin phrase deus ex machina comes to English usage from Horace’s Ars Poetica, where he instructs poets that they must never resort to a god from the machine to solve their plots. He refers to the conventions of Greek tragedy, where a crane (mekhane) was used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage.” Imagine Tarantino, his feet braced on clouds, lowering Dr. Schultz into “Django Unchained” and using him as a wonderfully useful device to guide the plot wherever it must go.

In the film we’ll find that Dr. Schultz, who we never see pulling any teeth, is a bounty hunter, searching for men who are wanted–“dead or alive.” Here is a plot that requires a lot of information, and doesn’t have any time to lose in introducing it or searching for it. Schulz not only knows who and where Django is, but he knows where certain wanted men can be found, living under aliases. He shoots a sheriff and calmly explains why. He produces the Wanted posters from his bottomless wallet. His knowledge allows Tarantino to set up perfectly entertaining scenes in which it appears Schultz digs himself into holes and then escapes from them.

He also becomes the friend and partner of Django, gives him his freedom, and after a winter spent in using Django as his partner in bounty hunting, joins with him in trying to win back possession of Broomhilda ( Kerry Washington ), Django’s wife. Why does he do this? Because he likes Django and hates slavery. This is a convenience making QT’s story telling much easier.

This is a brilliant entertainment, in which Tarantino takes on the subject of slavery as he did the Holocaust in his previous film, “ Inglourious Basterds .” That one, too, employed Christoph Waltz in a leading role, using his German-accented formalities to talk his way through situations. Tarantino loves dialogue and lets it run at unusual length for the quasi-exploitation genre. Consider QT’s audacity in allowing “Basterds” to open with so much verbiage. Tarantino is a man who tells us his early job was in a video store, where, if this can be believed, he viewed virtually every video. He left that job in 1989. Five years later, I was talking to him at Cannes, where the video store clerk from Knoxville had entered “ Pulp Fiction ,” the eventual Palme d’Or winner. One thing he didn’t learn from those exploitation classics was the art of sparse dialog. You can almost imagine his relish in retelling the stories of his favorite films in more detail than they used.

Because “Django” is so filled with violence and transgressive behavior, he told me something that day that’s worth remembering when discussing “Django:” “When I’m writing a movie, I hear the laughter. People talk about the violence. What about the comedy? ‘Pulp Fiction’ has such an obviously comic spirit, even with all the weird things that are happening. To me, the most torturous thing in the world, and this counts for ‘Reservoir Dogs’ just as much as it does to ‘Pulp,’ is to watch it with an audience who doesn’t know they’re supposed to laugh. Because that’s a death. Because I’m hearing the laughs in my mind, and there’s this dead silence of crickets sounding in the audience, you know?”

I sorta know. There were however some dead crickets in my mind during the scene in “Django Unchained” where we visit a Southern Plantation run by a genteel monster named Calvin Candie ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), who for his after-dinner entertainment is having two slaves fight each other to the death. It’s a brutal fight, covered with the blood that flows unusually copiously in the film. The losing slave screams without stopping, and I reflected that throughout the film there is much more screaming in a violent scene than you usually hear. Finally the fight is over, and there’s a shot of the defeated slave’s head as a hammer is dropped on the floor next to it by Mr. Candie. The hammer, (off-screen but barely) is used by the fight’s winner to finish off his opponent.

At this point in the film I found myself mentally composing a letter to Quentin, explaining why I stopped watching his film. The letter went unwritten. There are such scenes in most Tarantino films. Do you remember Michael Madsen cutting off the cop’s ear in “Reservoir Dogs?” When QT begins a movie, I believe, his destination is to aim over the top. The top itself will not do.

We know that he is a student and champion of exploitation films. He digests their elements and reforms them at the highest level of their ambitions. The point of the exploitation genre is to grab people on the basis of the shocking material itself, regardless of such elements as movie stars, budgets, artistry, profundity or anything else. In the hearts of many moviegoers there stubbornly lurks the desire to be… exploited.

This is an irrefutable fact: On the post-holiday weekend I’m writing, “Django” ended second at the box office with $20 million. “The Hobbit” was third with $17.5 million, and “Les Miserables” fourth with $16 million. The weekend’s #1 top-grossing film was a retread, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D,” with $23 million. This could be misleading; “Django’s” current total is $106 million after only two weeks, but it’s revealing.

What Tarantino has is an appreciation for gut-level exploitation film appeal, combined with an artist’s desire to transform that gut element with something higher, better, more daring. His films challenge taboos in our society in the most direct possible way, and at the same time add an element of parody or satire.

Consider the fight scene I described. Where is the comedy? Tarantino says he hears laughter in his mind. Why? I suspect it’s because this entire film takes the painful, touchy subject of slavery and approaches it without the slightest restraint. At some point in the scene, QT’s laughter may be because the audience expects to see violence but doesn’t expect to get it a such an extreme; he’s rubbing it in.

The film is often beautiful to regard. Tarantino’s Southern plantations are flatlands in spring, cloud-covered, with groups of slaves standing as figures in a landscape. His film leads us all the way to Candyland, where the odious Calvin Candie owns Django’s wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington). Candie stages fights to the death with slaves called Mandingos, and Schultz says he wants to buy one of the fighters. He says he’ll throw in a little extra for Candie’s slave women Broomhilda, because she speaks German and he yearns to speak his native tongue.

That’s clever misdirection with the mandingo as a cover story. Candie believes it. Not everybody at Candyland does. This is such a flamboyant film that the most challenging performance in it, the one that rubs it in the most, actually runs the risk of being overlooked. That is Samuel L. Jackson’s work as Stephen, Calvin Candie’s most favored and privileged slave. He acts as butler and chief of staff at Candyland. He is well-dressed, treated with (relative) respect by Candie, and seen by the other slaves as no better than a racist white–worse, because he betrays his race. He is the classic Uncle Tom, elevated to Granduncle Thomas, Esq.

There’s a telling scene where Stephen and Calvin relax behind closed doors at the end of the day, sharing snifters of brandy. In these closed quarters, they might be equals. I was reminded of “Downton Abbey” and the privileged conversations between the Earl of Grantham and the butler Carson. No doubt Stephen leads the most comfortable life possible for a slave at that time, but what a price he pays! No one has glowering eyes that threaten more than Jackson’s, and we can all but read his mind as he regards Django, Broomhilde and Schultz and sees through Schutz’s story that he wants to pay a preposterous price just for someone to speak German with. He confronts Calvin with the obvious: It is Django who loves Broomhilde and desires her.

Revealing this truth involves Stephen in a betrayal that in some respects is the most hateful action in the movie, because he sins not only against the others but against himself. He confirms that in some putrid sinkhole of his soul, he regards himself as white. How Tarantino deals with the consequences of his betrayal sets the whole ending of the film into motion, with its satisfactory Quentonian celebration of violence, explosions, all that stuff. Stephen is also, if you will, a deus, cranked down onto the stage so his realizations can cut through revelation of the secret the others share. He works for that purpose, but also, in a film that condemns white racism, is also capable of seeing black racism.

Stephen is a crucial character because he forces African-American viewers to acknowledge the role some of their forebearers played at the time. Just as more recently in South Africa, a system in which one person rules ten is made possible by the cooperation of some of the ten. It is a hard, unavoidable fact. Jackson’s performance requires not only his gifts as an actor but his courage as a man who understands the utility of an obvious role and is willing to play it.

The name “von Shaft” also reflects QT’s wicked fondness for bringing distracting and outlandish names into the midst of dead-serious and violent material, as sort of a signal to the audience that Tarantino knows he’s treading on the edge of parody. Tarantino’s predecessor, Russ Meyer , also loved to saddle his characters with unexpected names; in “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,” we find Eufaula Roop, Mr. Peterbilt, Dr. Asa Lavender, Semper Fidelis, Norse Flovilla Thatch and Beau Badger. (The name “Eufaula,” Russ told me, came from the name of the Southern town where one of his old Army buddies lived.)

“Django” has been criticized for its overuse of the n-word, a long-standing charge against Tarantino. In this case, although the total comes to over 100, I understood it as a word in common daily use through the antebellum South. In context, there was a reason for it. The film has also been attacked for its incredible level of violence, and that’s what I was responding to in composing my imaginary letter to Tarantino. Yes, it deserves its R rating and in an earlier day might have drawn the X. But it’s not what a film does but how it does it, and in one sense the violence here reflects Tarantino’s desire to break through audience’s comfort level for exploitation films and insist, yes, this was a society and culture that was inhuman.

Tarantino attacks at all levels. One of his most inspired scenes involves the Klan members bitching and moaning that they can’t see through the eye-holes on the hoods over their heads. In everything but subject, that could be from a Looney Tunes movie. QT is grandiose and pragmatic, he plays freely with implausibility, he gets his customers inside the tent and then gives them a carny show they’re hardly prepared for. He is a consummate filmmaker.

Looking at his IMDb entry, I find that Tarantino has a film in pre-production that will be some kind of retread of Russ Meyer’s “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” That’s the film John Waters has described as “not only the greatest film ever made, but the greatest film that ever will be made.” For Tarantino, the lure of the title alone must have been irresistible, a tug in the back of his mind from those long-ago video store days.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Django Unchained Reviews

Django Unchained is still one of Quentin Tarantino’s finest works to date thanks to an excellent, extremely memorable script and a brilliant cast

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2024

By tackling a massive western, the writer and director continues to prove that he has never been short on ambition and gives us his grandest spectacle yet.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 7, 2024

It might not be the most innovative in Tarantino’s oeuvre, but it’s got real stakes and memorable characters one can root for. Django is packed with Tarantino’s postmodern trademarks, but it also has the added value of actually addressing serious issues.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2023

In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino brings his revisionist style to the Spaghetti Western in one of his most violent movies to date.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2022

Quentin Tarantino continues to play with history and cinematic tradition in Django Unchained, his self-proclaimed “Southern” whose deposits of blaxploitation and Spaghetti Western filmmaking engage a violent saga of revenge and historical atrocity.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 20, 2022

The good moments are really good, but each of them are bookended by one questionable narrative choice or a blast of QT style that doesn’t always help the film as a whole.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

It's a fun but flawed film on the cusp of mastery that comes up slightly short.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 23, 2022

Two Tarantinos directed each a half of the film, a dizzying way of telling a dizzying story, all of it to bring the western apocalypse, referencing Kill Bill (USA, 2003) and culminating with and ending that is so pop culture... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 7, 2022

I think to myself that "disappointed" is a strong word for it. But it's not. Pieces work but somehow the movie just really didn't gel.

Full Review | Jan 10, 2022

Packed with thrilling gunfights, tense drama, memorable quippy dialogue, and an impressive collection of breakout performances (minus Tarantino's weird cameo), Django Unchained easily ranks among the very best films Tarantino has ever produced.

Full Review | Oct 22, 2021

Gutsy and entertaining.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Sep 18, 2021

Django is another example of Tarantino looking at cultural American history through the lens of privilege, twisting truth and fiction through a grotesque, funhouse mirror.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2021

Django Unchained is a miserable work, implausible and unconvincing from beginning to end (unlike the best "spaghetti Westerns" Tarantino claims to admire).

Full Review | Feb 12, 2021

Christoph Waltz once again turns in a performance (largely due to the writing) that is astoundingly likeable and worthy of award consideration.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 1, 2020

There's a lot of lunacy in Django Unchained.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 6, 2020

Django Unchained may cross the line in its excess, but all the while, it remains consistently riveting up to its spectacular end.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 29, 2020

Tarantino accomplishes what he set out to do, make a fun, violent, badass spaghetti western. He brings together the classic aesthetics of the genre, with his modern, pop culture saturated sensibilities, and his whip smart dialogue.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 10, 2020

Is another great film from Tarantino that reflects the level of maturity his cinema has reached. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 25, 2020

A loose-cannon Best Picture pick.

Full Review | Jun 19, 2020

Tarantino designed this revisionist western to blow people's gaskets. Packed with physical comedy, bloody action and hell-bent revenge, it looks like a classic widescreen Sergio Leone western...

Full Review | Mar 31, 2020

A critical review of ‘Django Unchained’:

Eye on the Oscars 2013: Best Picture

By Todd Kushigemachi

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Writer-helmer Quentin Tarantino has always been a crix favorite. Each of his six previous feature-length directorial efforts garnered approval from at least 84% of critics, according to the reviews surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes. His latest genre-bending blood fest, “ Django Unchained ,” continues the streak of widespread acclaim.

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For critics, Tarantino’s slave-liberating epic invited references to 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds.” After all, both boast titles alluding to Italian action films and play with history as freely as they play with genre, allowing the oppressed to enact vengeance on the oppressor. These comparisons were favorable, with Marc Mohan of the Portland Oregonian writing that “Django” is “not quite as inspired as ‘Basterds'” but “close enough to make no difference.”

Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson received a great deal of positive attention for their supporting work. Lead Jamie Foxx was often overlooked for his more subtle performance, but writing for NPR, Stephanie Zacharek said Foxx is “terrific precisely because he’s so unflashy.”

Still, Waltz was the MVP in many eyes for his turn as the eloquent bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz.

“Theoretically supporting Foxx in the title role, Waltz doesn’t steal the picture,” wrote Richard Corliss of Time. “He’s handed it and handles the opportunity with effortless craft.”

Critics were split on the film’s 165-minute running time, with some citing the length as exhausting and others finding it generous. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune suggested Tarantino is “a lousy self-editor” who “struggles with pacing and excess and detours.” At the other end of the spectrum, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed the movie “shouldn’t be a minute shorter.”

While the debate over the movie’s take on slavery might be contentious in some circles, most film critics stepped up to defend this aspect of Tarantino’s latest. A.O. Scott of the New York Times argued “Django” is characterized by “moral disgust with slavery” and “instinctive sympathy for the underdog.”

Variety said: “The film pays breathtaking respect not just to Tarantino’s many cinematic influences, but to the country itself, envisioning a way out of the slavery mess it depicts. In sheer formal terms, ‘Django Unchained ‘ is rich enough to reward multiple viewings, while thematics will make this thorny ‘southern’ — as the director aptly dubs it — perhaps his most closely studied work.”

Eye on the Oscars 2013: Best Picture Are directors behind punishing run times? | The upset that wasn’t an upset: ‘Shakespeare in Love’ Critics praise, punch nominees Pointed critiques accompany plaudits for the contenders, giving voters plenty to chew on “Amour” | “Argo” | “Beasts of the Southern Wild” | “Django Unchained” | “Les Miserables” | “Life of Pi” | “Lincoln” | “Silver Linings Playbook” | “Zero Dark Thirty”

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‘django unchained’: film review.

Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio star in Quentin Tarantino's revenge saga mostly set in the Deep South just before the Civil War.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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"Kill white people and get paid for it? What's not to like?"

Jamie Foxx as Django

History gets another dramatic rewrite, Quentin Tarantino -style, in Django Unchained , a jokey, discursive, idiosyncratic and spirited film that does to slave owners what Inglourious Basterds did to Nazis.

Applying the episodic format and visual template of classic and spaghetti Westerns to a revenge saga mostly set in the Deep South just before the Civil War, the film makes a point of pushing the savagery of slavery to the forefront but does so in a way that rather amazingly dovetails with the heightened historical, stylistic and comic sensibilities at play. The anecdotal, odyssey-like structure of this long, talky saga could be considered indulgent, but Tarantino injects the weighty material with so many jocular, startling and unexpected touches that it’s constantly stimulating. A stellar cast and strong action and comedy elements will attract a good-sized audience internationally, though distaste for the subject matter and the irreverent take on a tragic subject might make some prospective viewers hesitate.

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Tarantino’s affinity for black culture and interest in the ways blacks and whites relate always have been evident, but they’ve never before been front and center to the extent that they are in Django Unchained. Some might object to the writer-director’s tone, historical liberties, comic japes or other issues, but there can be no question who gets the shaft here: This is a story of justifiable vengeance, pure and simple, and no paleface is spared, even the good German who facilitates a slave’s transformation into a take-no-prisoners hunter of whites who trade in black flesh.

At its core, then, the film entirely shares its raison d’etre with Basterds, which climaxed with a conflagration that fancifully obliterated the Nazi regime. It’s presented, however, as a lengthy journey, one that feels — both in its equivalent running time and luxuriant magnification of arguably incidental matters — quite like Sergio Leone’s great The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All the same, a lesser-known Italian director of many Westerns, Sergio Corbucci, is Tarantino’s declared touchstone here. Corbucci made the original Django, starring Franco Nero, in 1966, after which there were dozens of unofficial sequels, though none made by Corbucci. (Nero makes a brief appearance here, and in the spirit of European credit lines for famous actors playing small roles in movies, Tarantino amusingly employs the literal translation, “With the friendly participation of Franco Nero.”)

Imprinting at once his ‘60s archivist sympathies via the use of an old Columbia Pictures logo, bright red opening credits backed by a self-consciously cornball Western song and a lead-in title announcing that it’s 1858 “somewhere in Texas,” Tarantino makes anachronistic use of a few spring-loaded zoom shots to introduce Dr. King Schultz ( Christoph Waltz , in flowing salt-and-pepper locks and beard), a German bounty hunter posing as an itinerant dentist, as advertised by a large molar that jiggles on a spring atop his small wagon.

Unlike most men of the Old West, Schultz is an Old World man of many words, rarely using one where four or five will do as he articulately and amusingly explains himself to a succession of skeptical and well-armed ruffians. After considerable verbal ado, he takes down the leaders of a chain gang of slaves, one of whom, Django ( Jamie Foxx ), can identify the notorious Brittle Brothers, for whom Schultz hopes to collect the considerable reward.

Freeing the slave from his shackles, the impeccably mannered Schultz is polite and businesslike with the bedraggled Django in a way the latter certainly has never experienced, putting him on a horse, offering him $25 per brother if they find them and brazenly marching him into a saloon in the next town they hit to the gaping astonishment of the locals. Expressing the character’s confidence in his intelligence and a huckster’s delight in his skill at the con, Waltz gives a wonderfully large performance that breathes life into the film from the start. There might, in fact, be an element of fair play in Tarantino making Waltz’s German an exemplary fellow this time around after the actor’s villainous Nazi turn in Basterds , for which he won a supporting actor Oscar.

These initial passages serve to communicate how alarming it is in this context for whites to see “a n—– on a horse.” But this is just an appetizer for what white folks will end up encountering at Django’s hands before he’s done serving up his just deserts using the man-hunting skills taught him by Schultz. In a heart-to-heart, Django reveals that his wife was sold away to another master, but of particular interest to Schultz is the news that her name is Broomhilda (or so the reliably idiosyncratic speller Tarantino presents it) and that she speaks German, as she was raised by people from the old country. After Schultz explains the significance of her name, Django resolves to become his wife’s Siegfried, to slay the dragon that is her evil master and rescue his bride. Only Tarantino could come up with such a wild cross-cultural mash, a smorgasbord of ingredients stemming from spaghetti Westerns, German legend, historical slavery, modern rap music, proto-Ku Klux Klan fashion, an assembly of ‘60s and ‘70s character actors and a leading couple meant to be the distant forebears of blaxploitation hero John Shaft and make it not only digestible but actually pretty delicious. Some of it is over-the-top nutty, and a few things — like a mass argument that sounds like a bunch of modern Californians nattering at one another — come off as rather silly. But much of it is inspired or close to it, just as the underlying outrage at the fact that slavery even existed in this country until 148 years ago, is well and truly felt.

Quite naturally, given the historical setting, the N-word gets a heavy workout, by whites and blacks alike. But much more forceful is the cruelty dispensed by the Southern whites, both as punishment and whim; attack dogs are unleashed on one man, Mandingo fighters (in an homage to the unforgettable 1975 Mandingo) battle to the death in a beautifully appointed drawing room for the wealthy’s amusement, a woman is locked naked in a metal “hot box,” genital mutilation is arranged for a man and much more. For all the film’s genre hopping and playful spirit, this dead-serious foundation is never far from sight. As Sonny Chiba said in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, “Revenge is never a straight line.” And so it is here, as the unlikely pair of Schultz and Django rack up quite a fortune in bounties to finance their scheme to buy back Broomhilda from her owner, Southern scion Calvin Candie ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a smooth-talking, elegant young gentleman who welcomes Schultz to his vast plantation, Candyland, even if he can scarcely tolerate the presence of his black partner — who by now has traded in his ludicrous bright blue Little Lord Fauntleroy suit for the leather, hat and sunglasses of a fancy-pants cowboy.

Django seethes in silence as the whites discuss business and pleasure over a long dinner. In the process, the film’s focus shifts to Candie, whom DiCaprio plays with more relish than he’s brought to a part in some time, and Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), his old house slave whose combination of obsequiousness and diabolical shrewdness makes him a vivid character. Jackson’s appearance at first provokes a double-take — he’s somewhat stooped, filled out in the jowl and bald save for tufts of white hair on top and on the sides — but the Tarantino regular astutely judges just how far to push the jivey dialogue that offsets the subservient nature of the role. When Jackson is onscreen, it’s impossible to take your eyes off him.

The film’s greatest problem is that, especially in the second half, the Django character gets a bit lost in the shuffle; he doesn’t pop from the screen the way Schultz, Candie and Stephen do. Django is all about being resolute and determined, but more detail could have filled out the character’s transformation from downtrodden slave to steely master gunfighter. Schultz teaches him about Siegfried and firearms, but the long-journey format could have nicely accommodated a fuller, more gradual account of the expansion of Django’s mind and horizons; as it is, he lurches from impotent nonperson to cocky dude too abruptly. It’s true that cowboy and genre characters needn’t be deep, but because the other characters get most of the good lines, Django could have used something they don’t have: an extra dimension. Foxx doesn’t project the sort of charisma that the lucky few have to rivet audience attention even when they’re doing nothing, so when he’s not the center of attention, he seems withdrawn and not that interesting.

As he’s done before, Tarantino has peppered the huge cast with actors whose heydays date back as far as the ’60s; mostly they play cretinous types and show up just long enough to be recognized before getting killed. Among them are Bruce Dern, Russ Tamblyn, James Remar, Dennis Christopher, James Russo, Don Stroud, Tom Wopat, M.C. Gainey, Robert Carradine, Ted Neeley, Tom Savini and Michael Parks; Tarantino himself also plays one of these lowlifes. Don Johnson clearly relishes his scenes as a Tennessee plantation Big Daddy whose efforts to launch an early KKK-like raiding party prove inept, while Jonah Hill looks predictably out of place during his few seconds of screen time.

Veteran production designer J. Michael Riva died during filming, but his fine hand particularly shows in the detailed interiors for Candyland and a New Orleans brothel. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is elegant and rugged as needed. Costume designer Sharen Davis has opportunities for some fun both with Django’s developing wardrobe and Schultz’s finery, which includes a suit and cape that prefigures that of Sherlock Holmes. This is the director’s first film without his invaluable editor, the late Sally Menke, but Fred Raskin, an assistant editor on the Kill Bill films, has filled in capably.

As always with Tarantino, the soundtrack is a wildly eclectic thing. Spaghetti Western scoring master Ennio Morricone is represented by eight tracks, some recycled and one original song, while there’s also rap and more contemporary sounds from the likes of James Brown and 2Pac — together in “Unchained (The Payback/Untouchable)” — and Rick Ross, as well as “Django (Main Theme)” by Luis Enriquez Bacalov and Rocky Roberts.

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Movie review: ‘Django Unchained’ is Tarantino unleashed

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Here is the particular brilliance of Quentin Tarantino: He can rip a horrific page out of history — for his latest, “Django Unchained,” slavery in the antebellum South — put it through his favorite grindhouse mill, kick in biting comedy whose sheer audacity and searing irony demands laughter, and yet ... and yet ... never for a moment diminish or let us forget the brutal reality.

What the writer-director did so caustically to Nazis in 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” — scalping (literally) and roasting (comically) — was apparently just a warm-up.

In “Django,” Tarantino is a man unchained, creating his most articulate, intriguing, provoking, appalling, hilarious, exhilarating, scathing and downright entertaining film yet. Even given the grand tradition of artists using their work for sharp social rebukes — Mel Brooks’ genius swipe at Nazism in “The Producers,” for one —Tarantino’s mash-ups between the unconscionable inhumanity of others and his outrageous riffs on the matter defy comparison.

PHOTOS: ‘Django Unchained’ - Quentin Tarantino, Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz

The four horseman of his apocalypse — Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson — come with guns and metaphors blazing. Their archetypes serve to mark out the battleground Tarantino bloodies with a vengeance that surpasses everything else in his archive, including “Kill Bill” volumes 1 and 2.

Django (Foxx), the slave/freeman; Dr. King Schultz (Waltz), the liberator; Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), the abusive plantation owner; and Stephen (Jackson), the sycophant house slave, provide the film’s chaos and catharsis with every rise and fall of their clashes. The indictment comes with each stroke of the lash — and there are countless of them — none harder to watch than the whipping of Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Django’s wife.

With Tarantino there’s always a very specific artistic influence informing the theatrics on screen, and in “Django” the style is a priceless cut at spaghetti westerns. The primary homage is to the two Sergios (Corbucci, who introduced “Django” into the movie lexicon in 1966, and Leone, who created a fistful of classics). Whether it was nothing more than a creative choice or a latent desire to extend the Italian dominance of the genre across generations and borders, Tarantino has never seemed more comfortable in the saddle.

The film begins with a line of slaves shackled together on a forced march across a desert that is scorching hot by day, frigid by night. Title cards, which are dropped in periodically, their size a clue to significance, starts the timeline at two years before the Civil War. The arrival of Dr. Schultz, ostensibly a dentist, a giant tooth bobbing atop his coach, changes the course of everyone’s life. He is actually a bounty hunter looking to acquire a slave named Django to identify the three murdering-thieving Brittle brothers, who mask their illegal activity as overseers for hire and have a substantial price on their heads.

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Schultz puts forth his proposition with such elegant erudition that it rarely fails to nettle nearly anyone he encounters. This first group, a matted bunch of slavers who spit tobacco and growl at Schultz to “talk English,” are typical. The cultural clash becomes one of the film’s smartest running gags, and Waltz’s delivery, as slick as it is sly, is possibly better than his Nazi colonel in Tarantino’s “Basterds,” which won him an Oscar.

DiCaprio’s villain, who turns up later, is equally exceptional in radically different ways. It is one of the film’s conundrums for Foxx, technically the leading man. He does a fine job of melding his newly freed slave into a masterful gunslinger, with all the swagger and retribution that suggests. But there are so many finely crafted performances around him, it’s hard for him to rise above the rest.

The side proposition Schultz makes with Django is his freedom once he identifies the Brittles. Over the many campfires that follow, life stories are traded, a friendship is formed and a partnership in the bounty-hunting game is hammered out: “I get paid to shoot white men?”

As satisfying as that is — for us as well — what Django wants most is to buy the freedom of his beloved Broomhilda, their marriage illegal in those times.

Though the bounty-hunting business is filled with scoundrels, slavery is the central villain here. Schultz and Django encounter the many faces of that evil in the course of their travels. A few lend themselves to slapstick, like the birth of the KKK. Others — such as the rarefied world of the bordello beauties and the softer life of the house slaves — get a more ironic treatment. But mostly the director chooses to expose the cruelty. The various types of torture used to punish runaways — attack dogs, hot boxes and, of course, the whipping posts — are unsparingly depicted.

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Though badness abounds, evil incarnate thrives in particularly insidious ways in Candyland, a huge Mississippi planation run by its pampered potentate, Calvin. Never has DiCaprio been more sinister than he is here — sarcasm dripping in every honeyed word, insolence flickering in his eyes, hate in his heart. The to-the-death sport of Mandingo fighting is his current obsession and the stage for some of the most difficult scenes to stomach. When Schultz discovers Broomhilda has been sold to Candyland, a major ruse around the sport is concocted in their bid to buy her freedom, and the various complications drive the back half of the film.

Since this is quintessential Tarantino, there is never much time between blood-spilling. Somehow, he and cinematographer Robert Richardson have created a palette that connects the visual sensibility of the Old South and the Old West seamlessly — the blood is just as red and bountiful in both places.

One of Tarantino’s great strengths, and weaknesses, as a filmmaker is the way he falls in love with his actors and his ideas. It makes him reluctant to let go of certain bits and means that others go on too long — often it’s the highly choreographed action scenes that he can’t bear to end.

This pushes “Django” close to the three-hour mark, and there are a couple of spots when you are sure you’ve just witnessed a bang-up ending only to find Tarantino setting things up for another round. Editor Fred Raskin, who has worked on a number of the director’s projects, must have the patience of Job. I can just imagine the pained expression Tarantino gets when he’s forced to make cuts — it’s there in his cameo, which might have been a place to start.

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‘Django Unchained’

MPAA rating: R for strong graphic violence throughout, a vicious fight, language and some nudity

Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes

Playing: In general release

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Former Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey is an award-winning entertainment journalist and bestselling author. She left the newsroom in 2015. In addition to her critical essays and reviews of about 200 films a year for The Times, Sharkey’s weekly movie reviews appeared in newspapers nationally and internationally. Her books include collaborations with Oscar-winning actresses Faye Dunaway on “Looking for Gatsby” and Marlee Matlin on “I’ll Scream Later.” Sharkey holds a degree in journalism and a master’s in communications theory from Texas Christian University.

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