Blow up

Here is a Quentin Tarantino film that, like all Quentin Tarantino films, is a typical Quentin Tarantino film, in the style of Quentin Tarantino, in that he takes a familiar trope, nods at it, toys with it, pokes it about, swills it round his mouth, then blows the whole thing up. I wonder if he was like this as a little boy. I wonder if his mother ever said to him, ‘Quentin. I love you. You’re my son. But if you keep stringing the other kids along so exploitatively and then blowing everything up in their poor faces they aren’t going to want to play with you. I don’t know where you get it from. Now, go tidy your room, dear, before I slice off your ear and shoot out your stomach so blood splatters out the front, out the back and up the wall. Run along.’ The thing is, Django, which is set in the American South and takes on black slavery, is a good film, and a crazily entertaining film, until Tarantino does blow everything up, at which point it just becomes rather silly. And I didn’t want to play any more.

This is, I suppose, Tarantino’s take on the Spaghetti Western trope and that particular type of hero who uses cunning and inordinate weapons skills to see off trouble and dig himself out of holes. (Interesting Titbit Alert: the Django title is taken from a series of 1950s Italian cowboy movies whose first star, Franco Nero, turns up here in a cameo.)

Set in America a couple of years before the Civil War, our first hero is Dr Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German bounty hunter masquerading as an itinerant dentist. (He drives a wagon with a giant molar wobbling on the roof.)