Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Tarantino finally gets around to doing his first actual Western, although in truth many of his films were already Westerns in all but era - Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds - being pinned as they were on moving from one drawn-out stand-off to another in Leone style. So, knowing that Tarantino has to reference like a shark needs to keep moving, why not draw on Leone explicitly? Perhaps he was too much of a sacred cow to touch, whereas Sergio Corbucci's Django was a safer beast to milk, given cult status by virtue of some deranged confrontation sequences and not much else, a poor cousin of the Leone films in every aspect.
The story is nothing to do with the original, in any case, with the hero a slave freed by a jovial German bounty hunter who then helps him to set about rescuing his wife from a slave-owner. The plot is functional, serving just to go from one bloody crescendo to another, but the cast is as strong as you habitually get with Tarantino, from Christoph Waltz as the philosophising helper to Leonardo DiCaprio's monstrous plantation owner and Samuel L. Jackson's even more loathsome character as the head of the plantation staff, full of contempt for his own race. Surrounded by these elemental forces, Jamie Foxx's gunslinger is actually somewhat of a soft centre, there are longueurs in the course of going on three hours, and you may wince at the 110 uses of the word 'nigger', as well as having reasonable grounds for doubting whether the director really manages to say anything of depth about race and the slave trade or if he is rather guilty of disingenuity. However, as ever, there's no denying Tarantino's panache, though, or mastery of turns of phrase.

7/10