Django Unchained

It takes two (extra hours) to Django

Dear Hollywood, when we said ‘overstuffed’, we were talking about our stomachs during holiday feasts, not movies.

Yes, your bottoms will be sore after you traverse the long and winding road alongside freed slave Django in Quentin Tarantino’s latest macabre smorgasbord, Django Unchained. Movies verging on three hours in length are the trend of the 2012 holiday season, it would seem. But when the film is as delightfully unhinged and as resiliently bizarre as Django is, shouldn’t the few pounds of extra fat be as welcome as they were Christmas evening?

Audiences could argue the film succumbs to its own insanity somewhere within its final twenty minutes, as the track the script seems to be taking swerves along an unpredictably divergent path. Yet at the same time you can practically hear Tarantino jumping up and down with excitement when the film proverbially sheds its shackles and jumps from ‘contained quirkiness’ to ‘chaotic mumbo jumbo.’ When Tarantino finally unchains himself in both the screenwriter’s desk and the director’s chair, the results are eccentric and unordinary, but that’s the movie’s entire point.