Quentin Tarantino romanticizes a horrendous chapter in American history, stuffing it into the small saddlebag of a Spaghetti Western. With a runtime of almost three hours and a body-count too high to count, by the end of it one wonders why one has no affinity for any of the characters, and why Django and his accomplice Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) were so adamant about getting the prized Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who didn’t seem like a woman at all, but an idea, a poorly sketched out caricature, the helpless damsel in distress who required her man to free her.
Eventually, blood loses its shock value. Tarantino apparently thinks it’s therapeutic for his audience as he wallows around in the puddles he’s created. He is also fascinated with the swagger and pomp of a character played by, Jamie Foxx , utterly disassembling his adversaries’ bodies, bullet by bullet, with fountains of scarlet gushing in the distance as he walks into the sunset, satisfied. And relatively unscathed.
More than anything, this movie makes one frustrated at having wasted three hours of their life on a comic book arcade game. Quentin Tarantino degrades the art of film. He has a formula for what movies are; plot arc, violence, comic relief. There is no art in that. He is not putting himself into his art. He is simply creating a stamp for what movies should be in his opinion, which is entertaining. And he smugly takes the Oscar for “Best Original Screenplay” over such masterful works as “Amour” and “Moonrise Kingdom.”