Django Unchained

In Django Unchained Jamie Foxx is a slave named Django who is bought by a dentist turned bounty hunter by the name of Dr. King Schultz with the hope that Django can help Schultz identify and capture three dangerous slavers who have a bounty on their heads. Schultz agrees to free Django when the deed is done, and also to help Django find his wife named Broomhilda. The journey to find the three slavers brings Django and Schultz to the home of an evil man named Calvin Candie. Django and Schultz must fight for their lives if they wish to find the three men to bring them to justice (read: kill them) and to find Broomhilda.

If you know anything at all about Quentin Tarantino, then you'll know that his movies are all ultra violent with an almost gleeful attitude towards blood and gore. Django is no different. Within the first ten minutes several people are already dead and the violence only gets ramped up from there until the very end. I went into it expecting large amounts of blood and gore, but Django took my expectations and multiplied the amount tenfold. I left the theater a little queasy from how much gore was shown. In a way I wasn't expecting to like Django because so far the only Tarantino film I have ever actually liked was Inglourious Basterds. That fact still remains true after seeing Django.

I hate it when movies are rated R just so they can show graphic violence. I'm ok with R-rated action films in general, but only if it's not wall-to-wall graphic violence; and only if the violence is necessary for the story i.e. almost any war movie or action thriller. I don't see the point in having someone shoot a pistol and there be what seems like 5-10 yards worth of blood splatter. I do realize that it is Tarantino that is the director, so I should have expected quite a bit of blood and gore (which I was). It's just that I personally feel like this was too graphically violent even for Tarantino. I think he could have dialed it down a notch or two and it would have been great. I also could have done without all the language. The N-word alone is said about 100+ times, not to mention the "normal" (using that term loosely by the way) curse words. With the language I also realize that the N-word was commonly used back then and it was culturally ok, but I was concerned because it seemed unnecessary to include it that many times. I somehow doubt that any amount of language was used that often by anyone back then, let alone the N-word. I certainly have never heard anyone use that much language in real life nowadays as it was used in Django. All in all I wanted to like it; it had its moments that I actually did enjoy, but they were far too few.