Django Unchained

22.00 I was surprised by Django Unchained which is Quentin Tarantino film in the style of Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns complete with loud power ballad overlay although it is set in the barbarism of plantation slave labour in Texas and Mississippi. Christopher Waltz play a former Dentist who makes his life as a shoot first dead or alive Bounty Hunter who intercepts (Jamie Foxx as Django) when he is being sold from an estate with three brother overseers who are on the blacklist of Dr King Shultz of German background) of wanted villains using new names and who has does not know what they look like.. He searches for Django top enable identification and tries to persuade the traders sell him voluntarily at a fair price to aid in his search. They decline and in the shoot out he kills one, wounds the other which he leaves for the other slaves to kill and bury deep before telling them to follow the North Star heading in its direction.

Django gets a horse and a winter coat and rides as an assistant with the promise of money and freedom. They ride into a western type town where a black man on horseback is a novelty and where the man is refused at the bar so they help themselves and then kill one of he lawmen who is in fact a fugitive with the price on his head much to the amazement of the other lawman and townsfolk.

For Django the search for the three brother is personal because of the way they treated him and his German family origin speaking black slave wife who has been sold separately. They trick their way on the estate and it is Django whose gun work has been polished up who shoots two close to hand and uses a riffle to get the third running away. . The estate owner creates what appears to be the first Klu Klux Klan local get together with white covered heads cut from bags out of which they cannot properly see. The now joint Bounty Hunting team have anticipated the raid and blow a good proportion of the terrorist up with dynamite attached to their wagon as well as riffle picking out the plantation owner as the rest run off. He is known as Big daddy echoing the Burl Ives Role.

It is only in the second part of the film that Dr Shultz works out a plan of how they can rescue his newly traded wife by presenting themselves as interested in acquiring the best black fighter ( to death gladiator style) owned by Leonardo Di Caprio a Francophile who cannot speak French who has the biggest slave plantation in the state supported by a large number of white trash brutal scum overseers. Di Caprio is fascinated by the Django arrogance as a black slave trader and expert advisor on black fighters.

He alienates the white trash who promise retribution but their plan nearly works and the plan nearly works is shot after he kills Di Caprio who insisted on a hand shake on the deal. which would set both husband and wife officially free and instead shoots Leonardo with the consequence of about fifty guns do battle. The wife is used to force Django to surrender and he is sent off to stone break for a mining company and his wife is locked up for use by the men after the family funeral. The family includes the bosses widowed sister, his personal security man and a family black who has been with the estate for 76 years

Django tricks his way out of the transport cage to the mine with the promise of bounty money, then kills the men involved and frees the others being transported with him. He then returns and kills everyone in sight with the finale blowing up the mansion house to smithereens to the delight of his wife.

The film is controversial on two counts. At one level it is Spaghetti western Hollywood style which about 100 blood killings with lots of flesh splattering, However it is created in the style which one commentator describes as pulp fiction the constant use of the n word has offended contemporary sensibility of both those with enslaved ancestors as well as the liberal. This smacks of wanting to rewrite history although pulp fiction tongue in cheek style does offend the righteousness but this should be no more regarded as a blood thirsty caper. Samuel L Jackson plays the black guardian of the slave owning values which he subsequently argues is what some black republicans and no doubt others still hold.