DJANGO UNCHAINED

First a confession: I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino’s films – not all of them; I didn’t much care for the Kill Bill movies – because he, more than most, knows the value, power and beauty of words. At its best his dialogue makes his fi lms not only thrilling to watch but a pleasure to listen to.

Django Unchained is just such a movie. From the very beginning when, just before the American Civil War, Django (Jamie Foxx), a southern slave, is murderously rescued from a chain gang by an itinerant German dentist (Christoph Waltz) we’re strapped in on a roller-coaster ride of wit, action and – I must warn you – great violence.

Foxx is the nominal star but in fact he doesn’t come into his own until the last act. Before then it’s the remarkable Waltz (who won this year’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) who carries the film. He, we learn, is not just a dentist (actually we don’t see him doing any dentistry) but also a bounty hunter and he has bought and freed Foxx to help him track down three men who are wanted dead or alive.

We learn, too, that Foxx’s wife, Kerry Washington, is also a slave, as he had been, on the lavish plantation owned by charismatic but very cruel Leonardo DiCaprio. So in return for Foxx’s assistance in finding and killing the three men – plus various other fugitives with a price on their heads – Waltz agrees to teach him gunplay and the tricks of the bounty hunter’s trade and help him to free Washington.

He does this for two simple reasons: he likes Foxx and he hates slavery. As clearly does Tarantino. This is far more than a superb spaghetti western; it’s also a stringent attack on slavery in America’s antebellum days.

And the fact that Tarantino has been criticised for his characters’ frequent use of the N word doesn’t detract from that. What else did white people call blacks back then?

So we follow this oddly assorted and highly engaging pair on their bounty-hunting trail until the final, big showdown on DiCaprio’s plantation.

Here there are more pleasures in store. DiCaprio, normally a hero in such films, gives a splendidly convincing turn as a smooth, arrogant and extremely vicious villain. And an almost unrecognisable Samuel L Jackson matches him as his white-haired old Uncle Tom of a slave, so Uncle Tommish indeed that his loyalty is to his master, not to the ex-slave Django.

But there are many unexpected twists and turns like that in an imaginative, cleverly constructed story that has sharply pertinent things to say about the treatment of black slaves in America before the 13th Amendment.

The film ends up in an absolute bloodbath of bullet spattered bodies, which, if you are squeamish, will certainly make you ‘squeam’. All very deplorable no doubt but hugely entertaining, thanks to a great extent to Tarantino’s script, which deservedly won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.