A new Tarantino film has always been a pretty important
event, but I was totally unprepared for how uninteresting Django Unchained is. It
seems like Tarantino has joined the ranks of his own imitators, who are
legion. So many scenes feel like they
never got beyond the page and can barely be heard over the sound of the
writer/director chuckling under his breath at his own genius. There’s no doubt that Tarantino is extremely talented, but I wonder if he started to believe his own press
since Jackie Brown (1997), to the
extent that he feels that he can do no wrong and that everything he thinks of
is brilliant and cannot be edited.
That’s sad because he is such an enthusiastic filmmaker and a true lover
of genre films; he could make a lean, mean, 90-minute spaghetti western or
combat film so well, but he is burdened by the expectation of post-modern intertextuality
that is associated with his name. Even
while attempting to defy expectations, he still takes an easy path by pitting
his heroes against Nazis or racist slave-owners; guaranteeing cheap applause
whenever they meet a bloody end, which is often.
Personally I think Tarantino would be wise to shun his own reputation and
simply make the kind of films that he claims to love so much. In spite of all these criticisms, though, I
can’t deny that his films are still infinitely more worthwhile than the vast
majority of tripe flooding the theaters. I was happy to see Dennis Christopher,
seemingly raised from the dead, in his most substantial role in decades, but
other than that I didn’t find the film extremely memorable or interesting.
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