Bad taste gone worse

lgorenc

First I must say that I rarely write reviews. Most are already there to help a viewer decide whether to see the movie or not. An experienced moviegoer can always tell if the reviewer knows what he's talking about. But with Django unchained, that was such a horrible flick with sky high ratings, I just felt the urge to write down how disturbingly flawed and deeply deranged this movie is and not in a good way. It's been a long time since I have seen a good Tarantino movie. This era ended with his story and his part in Four Rooms. And after Kill Bill, things went downhill never to crawl back up. Every once in a while, Tarantino's flashy and expensive garbage is being spilled on theater screens all over the world, and the somewhat schizophrenic director surprisingly picks up even more fans along the dodgy way. I expected more from this movie, since I couldn't even sit through that dreary Inglorious bastards, so things had to get better. And yet, even though he had a perfect plot setting in a cruel time and place for black people in American history, he casted the still boyish looking I-must- be-the-bad-guy-in-that-movie DiCaprio who really gives his best to sell it but falls short, and you get yet another long term drug use flashback in a form of give-me-back-my-money drive-in movie, with an hour long boring film within a film - during the visit to Candie Land that starts with what can only be described as the first MMA fight ever held in a living room. In this openly racist movie, and not because of the excessive use of the n-word, whose star later promotes gun ban while making good money by shooting every white creature in this film that has sudden twists from serious to absurd, from grave to bizarre. Here we get a bad writing, bad music, bad casting, mediocre acting from an all-star cast and awful, awful direction. The dynamic sound makes you jump off your seat when someone slams the door on screen. How cheap is that? Well, the music was OK, but not for one playlist and certainly not for one western. You just can't mix Rio Bravo style songs and Elvis impersonator with modern rap music and get away with it. Unless your main character can spill buckets of blood with just one bullet or massacre crowds of armed rednecks just after practicing his gunslinger skills by shooting down a few bottles. We also see a drawer slide mounted Derringer save the day one time too many. We see black slaves speak fluent German. But this is a love story, and yet these extreme action scenes are the high tide here with tons of ketchup spills all around, with over the top gore that would make a B-slasher-movie look like British rom com, and the drab dramatic part will bore you to death and make you consider leaving the theater. Twice. What Quentin tries to achieve here, style wise, is the bleak mix of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar. But someone should've told him both movies are bad. Also, Samuel L. Jackson's pathetic make-up as well as his cartoonish role do not make things any better. I didn't expect to see Open Range, but this charade is a kind of rich gumbo, made out of all the bad ingredients from previous hyped Tarantino grindhouse style obsession movies or his dull WWII affirmative action fairy tale, that was oddly not enough spiced with finger licking good hot sauce from Leone, Hawks or Peckinpah, hence completely ruining this bad taste cinema and rendering it inedible. Now seeing these ratings, no wonder Gangnam style is the most viewed YT video ever. No wonder Hobit, Harry Potter, Batman, Spiderman and Lord of the Rings top the Best 250 list.

score 2/10

lgorenc 8 January 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2733237/