‘Django’ shoots, misses mark

By Roger Moore

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Bullets, bullwhips and beatings produce slo-mo geysers of blood. Pistol-eros launch into soliloquies on slavery and the German Siegfried myth.

“Django Unchained” is set in Quentin Tarantino’s pre-Civil War South. Another indulgent movie from the cinema’s reigning junk-genre junkie, “Django” mashes together 1960s Italian “Spaghetti Westerns” and ’70s American “Blacksploitation” pictures.

Hey, he got away with a fantastical World War II Holocaust revenge picture (“Inglourious Basterds”). Why not a “revenge for slavery” romp?

Django is a slave turned bounty hunter, a black man who gets to “kill white folks, and they pay you for it.” The film features a couple of Oscar winners — Jamie Foxx in the title role, and Christoph Walz, who won his statuette for “Inglourious.” And we’re treated to the usual selection of Tarantino retreads — character actors he admired in his video store clerk youth whom he anoints with Travolta/Pam Grier comebacks — from Dennis Christopher (“Breaking Away”) to James Remar (“The Warriors,” “48 Hours”).

The players are in fine form. But the movie he’s embroiled them all in is a hit-and-miss affair, at times an amusing reimagining of history, more often a blood-spattered bore.

It ambles between “the cool parts” — over-the-top shootouts. But the renowned witty Tarantino monologues that spark the interludes between shootouts are weak, the connecting threads scanty.

Waltz has a grand time playing a German dentist traveling the South in a more lucrative line of work: “I kill people and sell their corpses for cash.”

He’s a bounty hunter, a wry and well-read gunslinger who relishes the irony of his trade in the land of slavery as much as he relishes twirling the hairs of his beard.

Some scenes convey Tarantino-esque tension. But his unwillingness to trim anything slows the film to a crawl.

In “Django” he over- indulges himself and panders to his audience.