Django Unchained (2012)

Released in December 2012, Django Unchained arrived with the full weight of expectation that comes with a Quentin Tarantino picture. The film follows Django, a formerly enslaved man in the antebellum American South, who joins forces with a German bounty hunter named King Schultz to track down criminals for reward money, before the two turn their attention to a far more personal mission: rescuing Django's wife, Broomhilda, from the clutches of a powerful and sadistic plantation owner in Mississippi. It is a revenge story built on the bones of the Spaghetti Western tradition, filtered through Tarantino's characteristically heightened, pop-culture-saturated sensibility. The film runs to a full 165 minutes and pulls no punches in its depiction of the violence and dehumanisation of American slavery, a subject that generated considerable critical debate on release. Whether it had any right to treat that history through the lens of genre entertainment was a conversation that filled column inches for months, and it remains a talking point today.

Tarantino had, by this point, spent two decades building one of the most distinctive filmographies in contemporary American cinema. From his earlier genre experiments, including Jackie Brown and Kill Bill: Vol. 2, to the more sprawling ensemble work that would follow with The Hateful Eight, his output has consistently prioritised voice and style above almost everything else. Django Unchained was produced by The Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures and won Tarantino the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, one of two Oscars the film took home. The soundtrack draws on an eclectic mix of sources, including original compositions by the late Ennio Morricone alongside pre-existing tracks, gospel, soul, and hip-hop, a collision of eras that is very much by design rather than accident.

The cast assembled here is, on paper at least, remarkable. Jamie Foxx takes the lead as Django, bringing a controlled physicality and quiet intensity to a role that demands both. Christoph Waltz, fresh from his Oscar-winning turn in Tarantino's previous film, plays Dr. King Schultz with a kind of theatrical warmth that sits in interesting tension with the character's profession. Leonardo DiCaprio, cast against type as the charming and reprehensible plantation owner Calvin Candie, was making one of the more adventurous choices of his career at the time. Kerry Washington plays Broomhilda, the emotional centre around which the whole enterprise turns, and Samuel L. Jackson, a long-term Tarantino collaborator, delivers a performance as the house slave Stephen that is as provocative as anything else in the film. It is the sort of ensemble that, in lesser hands, might feel assembled rather than unified. Whether Tarantino makes it cohere is, of course, the question.

Peak Tarantino. One of the greatest films ever made. Easily in my top 10 of all time. Ennio Morricone’s haunting, operatic touches in the soundtrack are absolutely perfect. The explosive, action and sometimes hard to watch gore are NEEDED. The dialogue is sharpened to a razor’s edge. And the performances from the ensemble cast are all unreal. There is absolutely ZERO weakness in this movie. Leonardo DiCaprio delivers the best work of his career as the vile yet endlessly watchable Calvin Candie, as did Christoph Waltz as King Schultz, somehow making one of the most violent bounty hunters in cinema history seem like your favourite eccentric uncle. Jamie Foxx was a great casting choice here and I honestly can't think it could have been cast better. I’ve gone back and forth so many times with an almost sacrilegious question.... Do I prefer this to Pulp Fiction? I honestly don’t know. But what I do know is that Django Unchained is one of the most satisfying, stylish, and straight-up masterful films I’ve ever seen.

I keep coming back to that question about Pulp Fiction, and I suspect it will stay unresolved for a good while yet, which is not the worst problem to have. What I will say is that films which provoke that kind of internal argument, where you are genuinely weighing one supposed masterpiece against another, are rarer than you might think. If you want to explore the Western side of Tarantino's instincts from a very different angle, it is worth having a look at my thoughts on Westworld for a sense of how the genre has been pulled in all sorts of directions over the decades. Django Unchained, though, sits in a category largely of its own making. Some films you admire. This one you feel.

Rating: ★★★★★  | Year: 2012  | Watched: 2025-04-02

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Trailer

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More from Quentin Tarantino: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) · Inglourious Basterds (2009) · Pulp Fiction (1994) · Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)