“Django Unchained” might have been a revelation in 2005. But after Quentin Tarantino and others have spent years spoofing ’60s and ’70s genre movies, this mock spaghetti Western tastes like it came out of the microwave.
Like all Tarantino movies, “Django” features expertly engineered surprises, plenty of big movie moments and several instances of loopy brilliance, but it’s also a rehash of “Inglourious Basterds” with slavery substituting for Nazism. Moreover, this year alone, “The Man With the Iron Fists,” the Will Ferrell comedy “Casa de Mi Padre” and the cartoon “ParaNorman” all spoofed ’70s grindhouse flicks. This line of humor is starting to take on the air of mother-in-law jokes. (“Django,” which had a completely different plot, was a 1966 Western made by Italians starring Franco Nero, who has a cameo here.)
Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz make a superb pair of mismatched buddies, though. Foxx’s Django is a slave who is rescued by Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz, a mysterious German who liberates the other man from a chain gang in Texas. When Django turns out to be a natural marksman, the pair go into business together as bounty hunters. “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?” says Django.
Their goal is to exterminate three evil overseer brothers whom Schultz needs Django to identify, then find Django’s wife (Kerry Washington), who has been brutalized and sold off to a plantation in Tennessee owned by a twinkly eyed monster (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose hobbies include watching “mandingo fighting” — gladiatorial combat to the death between black men.
Tarantino has earned the privilege of taking his time to reveal his secrets, and the care with which the writer-director allows Schultz to emerge as a chatty, amusing cynic who despises slavery is a pleasure, as is the way Django gradually grows from a haunted, nearly silent victim to a slightly maladapted sidekick to a confident hero. One of the funniest moments comes when Django, invited to pick out his own costume while posing as Schultz’s valet, takes the opportunity to make a statement.
But this early going is less trailblazing than it is “Blazing Saddles,” with a landscape full of crackers aghast to see a black man in a position of authority. DiCaprio doesn’t show up until an hour in — as the head of a plantation called Candieland — and when he does, it’s clear he’s here to do exactly what Waltz did in “Basterds.” He is supposed to be the gentlemanly savage, the serpentine charmer.
DiCaprio can’t do it. He isn’t the actor Waltz is, and, moreover, Tarantino doesn’t come up with any memorable dialogue for him. Elements of the avenging Shoshanna character from “Basterds,” meanwhile, appear in both Schultz and Django, but that movie had more than half a dozen strong characters. This one has four: The final one isn’t Washington, who has little to do, but Samuel L. Jackson, who makes a major impact as a head slave at the plantation who turns out to be as horrifyingly racist as his boss. Few but Tarantino would have dared to write such a character, or to so freely use the N-word, which pops up dozens of times, appropriately enough given that this is the 1858 South.
But not much that happens in the last 45 minutes makes sense, which is a big disappointment considering that Tarantino’s sense of plot is normally exquisite. This time, he relies on lazy contrivances: Are we really supposed to believe that, at a Southern plantation, no one would be able to come up with a good idea on how to torture someone to death? There’s also an unlikely and pointless sacrifice. I can forgive lesser writers for being lazy or sloppy, but not the author of “Pulp Fiction.”