Quentin Tarantino’s Near-Perfect Western Masterpiece Is Officially Soaring on Streaming

Being such a fan of classic spaghetti Westerns, it was only a matter of time before Quentin Tarantino crafted his own take on the genre, filtered through his own indelible vision. After reshaping the public’s interpretation of crime, kung-fu/samurai, and man-on-a-mission films, Tarantino made the quintessential Western for the modern era with Django Unchained, his homage to the films of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, with the latter’s Django providing the namesake of his 2012 movie. Released during the holiday season, Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx as the titular freed slave-turned-bounty hunter out for revenge against his former captors, was a cultural phenomenon, grossing $425 million worldwide and sparking hot-button discourse over its transgressive content. Now one of the most popular films available to stream for free on Pluto TV, Django Unchained is as striking and rip-roaring as ever, and with Tarantino claiming that he’ll only direct one more feature film, it’s a great time to revisit some of his strongest work.

‘Django Unchained’ is a Revisionist Take on the Antebellum South

Image via The Weinstein Company

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As he previously did with Inglourious Basterds‘ revisionist take on World War II, Tarantino imagined an alternate world where a slave could be emancipated and empowered to fight back against the racist white plantation owners in the Antebellum U.S. South. The film reimagines this horrific chapter in U.S. history through a modern lens, with Django’s swaggering attitude, autonomy, and status in a pre-abolition America being knowingly anachronistic, along with much of the film’s music cues, costumes, and language. Django could be read as either a long-awaited spotlight for Black characters, who are notoriously sidelined in Hollywood Westerns, or a fetishized, sanitized retelling of African-American history by a white director.

Filling out Tarantino’s guns-blazing American-made spaghetti Western (the film is far more indebted to the dark and stylish Westerns of Leone than the elegiac cinematic poems of John Ford) is Christoph Waltz, winning his second of two Oscars for Tarantino as bounty hunter and Django emancipator Dr. King Schultz, as well as Kerry Washington as Hildi, Django’s enslaved wife and target of his rescue mission, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the heinous plantation owner and captor of Hildi, Calvin Candie. DiCaprio, in particular, is a true stand-out in Django Unchained, as he gives perhaps the most vicious and daring performance by a modern A-list movie star. Frequent Tarantino stock player Samuel L. Jackson is also at his best as Stephen, Candie’s head house slave and personal confidant.

With its bold formalist and thematic flourishes, Django Unchained is Tarantino’s most stylized and self-reflective film. He is so commanding of his own auteurial stamp that he doesn’t care what he borrows or repurposes from other movies, including reusing the main theme from Corbucci’s Django. Darkly funny, ultraviolent, formally audacious, and provocative, Django Unchained represents Tarantino in a nutshell.

‘Django Unchained’ Tackles Controversial Subjects

With every release of a Quentin Tarantino film comes controversy, and Django Unchained unsurprisingly inspired the most uproar the writer-director has ever seen in his career. Tarantino’s history with racial epithets and appropriation of Black culture has been considered an issue by countless viewers for decades. And for many, making a movie about Black slavery in the U.S. with his same vulgar and heightened sensibilities was the last straw. Django is filled with invigorating gunfire sequences and applause-worthy line readings by its titular star, and this theatrical, comic book-esque presentation of slavery is understandably tasteless for some viewers.

This also applies to his approach to dealing with the horrific racist acts depicted in the film. While colloquial uses of racial epiphets and racial hate crimes were undoubtedly part of this historical period, Tarantino expresses these ugly acts with the same pulpy aesthetic he used in Kill Bill. With his notorious precedent of writing white characters who use racial slurs gratuitously, it’s easy to question his intent with some of the film’s content, even in a film reflecting America’s history.

No matter where you stand in the debate, Django Unchained‘s thorny commentary is a worthy supplement to a seismic film by one of the world’s greatest living directors. Westerns are hard to come by these days, and the long-tailed legacy of Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern take on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly hits all the marks that would appeal to audiences in the 2020s, making any other Western in its wake feel like a copycat. Featuring impeccable performances by its stacked cast and lavish visual and production design, Django Unchained has the passion and wunderkind enthusiasm of a debut filmmaker obsessed with cinema, executed by a master of the trade.