So I just got back from seeing Django Unchained this evening at the Alamo Drafthouse. Fun time with some wonderful friends that make the movie even better. While I was watching the movie this evening, which the review will be coming shortly, I was excited to see Franco Nero in the movie making a nice little cameo during a bar scene. It’s a nice little nod to the man with the same name as our intrepid hero. Now Django Unchained is not an retelling of Django from 1966, but Tarantino did take a few flourishes with the movie and also a badass name for a hero.
A mysterious man trudges into town dragging a mud-stained coffin behind him. This man is Django (Franco Nero). After he saves Maria (Loredana Nusciak) from certain death, Django finds himself in the middle of a war between Mexican revolutionaries and a band of sadistic racists led by the fanatical Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo). In the face of overwhelming odds, Django has a plan: to exact revenge while pitting enemy against enemy.
A fantastic spaghetti western, Django ranks right up there in my Western picks along with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Unforgiven. This is just a plain kick ass movie with awesome sequences and a hero that is about as reluctant as they come. It’s a movie that strikes fast with the action which is about as fast as Django can draw his gun. He is a true death dealer, evident by the coffin he drags behind as he travels the wasteland, cleansing the evil of the world. It’s a movie filled with scummy villains of all kinds. Racists, savages, undeserving people who are on this Earth only to spread the disease of hate, this movie is almost like a pacification through the medium.
Django had a lot to say about the times, more so the cruelty of man itself with the warring gangs of Mexicans and the racists who were against the Mexicans in the movie. Even the setting of the film painted everyone as evil in some way, our hands dirty with sin and the judgment will come in the form of the grim reaper that Django so loving plays. The coffin dragging is so ominous, but fucking cool to look at and gives Django this mysterious edge to him. I mean, would you want to fuck with a guy who carries a coffin like some death dealing undertaker?
It’s a simple plot line that sticks with you, hell it sticks with me till this day. The mysterious gunslinger who carries death with him everywhere he goes. He is a man who is out for revenge on those that do evil and have done evil towards him. He is a deadly man who is insanely fast at the draw, dispatching countless foes in a movies whose body count was a concern upon the release. You can see the influences from this movie in Tarantino’s work, which is more so the violent aspects, but also some of the elements about good doing away with evil. It’s a fantastic piece of cinema and certainly one of my favorite Westerns.