Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds are cowardly film-making; their bold, fantastic opening statements turn into embarrassed scratch the back of your head and stare at the floor trailings-off...
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Quentin Tarantino is not innovative. He was, but doing the same thing for twenty years is not innovation.
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Compromise blights Django; it is two separate films forced together, oil and water in the same vessel: The slick romp; with prancing horses,exploding cowboys and Ku Klux kill-streaks. And the soulful, touching buddy-story of a former slave and the bounty hunter who freed him; and their visit to the slave trader who owns his wife.
The same goes for Basterds,where the tri-lingual tension of drinking milk, ordering three whiskies and waiting for strudel is juxtaposed against Brad Pitt’s dirty dozen knock-offs and their flighty ‘I spit on your (mass) grave’ revengeocide.
There is enough material to split either movie in two; the moving,human struggle against an individual tyrant with the broad back-drop of holocaust - with jaunty revenge rampages as companion pieces. Four great films in total, rather than two ok ones.
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What’s that? A famous director has something important to say about holocaust? Wait, never mind; it’s just Quentin Tarantino.
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I don’t want to take away what makes a movie so Quentissentially Tarantino, but the geysers of blood and winking in-jokes aren’t what make his best work great.
Colourful characters, unconventional narrative structure, iconoclastic dialogue; these are the hallmarks of his greatness.
But now it seems his fan boys will get antsy if a caricature of a bigot doesn’t get his junk exploded by a twelve gauge, with a quote-to-your-mates pay-off line, while kitsch 70s lettering scrolls across the screen, and a retro soundtrack plays.
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Hops from genre to genre, doing a Tarantino film. Does he have anything of substance to say? If not, fine; but don’t pretend like you do.
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Django Unchained is an average film, on average; the great parts are great, but the rest just detracts from that. The rompy, fun bits aren’t bad; and from the opposite perspective you might say the sad slavery stuff gets in the way of the fun, and this is a valid viewpoint too. But Django, and Basterds before it, do not form cohesive wholes.
Fine performances, fine dialogue, fine story; but the end products are far, far away from their potential - stymied by the dilettante auteur Quentin Tarantino.
Django: 3 Stars
Basterds: 3 Stars
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Christoph Waltz owns the two greatest opening scenes in recent cinema history.
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QT’s recent work is shackled by the shallow veneer of 90s cool as much as Spielberg’s is by sentimentality, or Michael Bay’s by awfulness.
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