Django Unchained Review

Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino's most purely pleasurable film, a spaghetti-western revenge fantasy that keeps its moral compass fixed while everything around it burns. Christoph Waltz's Dr. King Schultz is the great charm engine of the 2010s, a killer whose courtliness is both a weapon and, fatally, a conscience; his refusal of one final handshake is the film's whole ethic compressed into a gesture.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Calvin Candie as rot wearing manners, and Samuel L. Jackson's Stephen, the true power at Candyland, is the most disturbing performance in Tarantino's catalog. The dinner-table sequence, dread ratcheted line by line over a phrenology lecture, is peak tension craft, written so that every pleasantry doubles as a threat. Jamie Foxx wisely underplays, letting Django's competence speak.

Robert Richardson shoots snowbound bounty hunts and blood-soaked white interiors with pulp-poster boldness. The structure sags once, after the Candyland climax, where a captured-and-returned detour delays an ending the film has already earned, and Tarantino's own cameo tests goodwill. But scene for scene, the writing, the villainy, and the catharsis operate at the highest level the genre allows.