The film opens in the deep south just before the start of the Civil War. Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave who was recently sold after he and his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) tried to escape. He is branded and covered in scars from repeated whippings. While being transferred, he is intercepted by dentist turned bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Walz). Shultz needs Django's help tracking down some targets, and in return the good doctor is prepared to give Django his freedom, bounty hunter training, and assist him in rescuing his wife from her new owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), owner of Candyland, the most infamous plantation in the South.
Candie is a real piece of work. We meet him in a posh parlor cheering two slaves being forced to fight each other to the death in a sport known as Mandingo fighting, which Candie trades in. The scene itself is mesmerizing. Tarantino's camera keeps the fight obscured and slightly out of focus, forcing us to imagine the brutality. Only cutting to clear shots of the fight momentarily, as if anticipating the audiences flinches. Mandingo fighting may be fictional (we shouldn't expect reality from the man who blew up Hitler in a movie theater), but the sequence wonderfully illustrates how toxic the spirit of slavery was. He certainly didn't invent details like the whippings, hot boxes and dogs ripping apart runaway slaves. Quentin may be known for his stylized action violence, but here he shows us that he can just as easily do the brutal, harrowing kind as well.
Upon reaching Candyland, Django and Schultz meet Steven (Samuel L. Jackson), Calvin's slave butler. He enters the film as a cringe inducing Uncle Tom, but the moment he and Calvin are alone, Steven drops the act, makes himself a drink and asserts himself as the power behind the throne and the one man in the film more racist than Calvin. Tarantino isn't content with illustrating the hypocrisy of slavery in the country were "all men are created equal," but goes further into its legacy of hegemonic racism with Steven and even with Django who's almost too good when called upon to impersonate a slave trader himself. The implications of these characters, not to mention the anachronistic soundtrack (Rick Ross and the RZA both provide new material) are loud, righteous reminders that the scars of history are still very much with us.
This is not to say that Django Unchained isn't fun, on the contrary, the darkness of the film works because the film's genre elements refuse to let us get overwhelmed. There's a bunch of Spaghetti Western tropes like snap zooms and music cues from Luis Bacalov and Ennio "Greatest Living Composer" Morricone, though there is far too much talking for it to feel like a proper Italian Western. Waltz is a blast doing a more cuddly variation on his Basterds performance. There's a hilarious, albeit gratuitous, aside involving proto-KKK riders who can't see out of their hoods. Also when the film does switch into revenge mode, Tarantino gives us enough of his more entertaining school of violence to please any Kill Bill fan.
There's much to admire about Unchained, but it is a notch below Ingourious Basterds. The film isn't quite as well engineered as it should be. There are long scenes, particularly near the beginning, that feel like they're doing one thing at a time when they should be doing three. This might be Tarantino's most serious film since Jackie Brown, but it's not quite up to snuff structurally.
Grade: A-
