Modern Classics: ‘Django Unchained’ and Tarantino’s Cinema of Revenge

Disguised as someone who claims to care “only about cinema, while most human concerns leave him cold,” Quentin Tarantino is, in fact, a champion of noble causes—a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or perhaps the other way around. He often comes across as more provocative and politically incorrect than he really is. Django Unchained, like Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill, wears the mask of trashy, B-movie cinema, but beneath that surface they are all films about justice—politically correct at heart, even if gleefully incorrect in form.

Form, of course, is where Tarantino always shines. As a screenwriter, director, appropriator, and willful distorter of ideas, he remains an encyclopedia of obscure references designed to delight his fans. If his last two films—two parts of what he says may become a trilogy—were so widely celebrated, it’s because they pulled him out of the quotation-mark universe of his earlier work (Jackie Brown aside) and allowed him to forge richer connections between cinema and, let’s say, the world surrounding it.

Kill Bill was largely an homage to Asian action cinema, using its forms to stage a woman’s revenge after being brutalized. Inglourious Basterds adopted the structure of the “mission movie”—a subgenre of war and adventure films—to channel the vengeance of a woman and a platoon of soldiers against the Nazis. Here, Tarantino turns to the spaghetti western to mete out justice against slave owners, placing a freed slave at the center of a revenge story, aided by a German bounty hunter who liberates him and becomes his partner.

The “mission” (all Tarantino films are, in one way or another, missions) of Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is to rescue Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from the clutches of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a decadent plantation owner who keeps her as a particularly “special” kind of slave.

Naturally, reaching that point—which occupies the final hour or so of this nearly two-and-a-half-hour film—requires a long journey. Along the way, our protagonists kill for money and cross a harsh winter, inching toward their destination. Much of the film is devoted to the adventures of this eccentric duo as they gradually get to know each other and eventually become a team. Schultz can’t quite grasp the shock provoked by the sight of “a nigger on a horse,” leaving bewilderment in his wake, while Django slowly grows into his new life as a free man.

In the second half, set largely on Candie’s Francophile plantation, the job becomes far riskier, complicated further by the absurdly elaborate plan Schultz devises to free Broomhilda. Schultz simply doesn’t like doing things the easy way. He insists on inventing personas, confusing his interlocutors, and constantly surprising them. His life is a performance—much like Tarantino’s cinema. Why do things simply when it’s far more fun to make them complicated?

Beyond drawing on well-known references (Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Leone, and the bloodiest, trashiest American westerns), Tarantino ultimately makes “Tarantino movies”—something that’s obvious from the very first minute, thanks to dialogue that no other screenwriter could write and that most directors would trim for being too “digressive.” What surprised me most here is just how funny the film often is, especially in its episodic, less violent first half. Several scenes—one in particular, involving members of a proto–Ku Klux Klan—recall Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. In that sense, it’s closer to They Call Me Trinity, with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, than to Django, starring Franco Nero.

The film’s third act is best left unspoiled, but it is arguably the most violent section, on par with the bloodiest moments of Tarantino’s career. Unlike Kill Bill, where violence is fully absorbed by the genre’s heightened framework, here the western doesn’t entirely contain the level of aggressive, revenge-driven fury unleashed in the final stretch. And unlike Inglourious Basterds, where wit and strategy were central, here brute force seems to take precedence.

What always strikes me about Tarantino is that a filmmaker with such an abundance of cinematic ideas, such a sharp ear for dialogue, and such a talent for creating vivid, complex characters so often reduces his stories to revenge epics. It feels limiting, even reductive. In this film—lacking the fractured chronology that helped mask that obsession in others—the “revenge of the nerds” impulse becomes especially apparent: the fantasy of justified retaliation by the bullied, the wronged, the humiliated.

This isn’t necessarily a flaw. By translating themes usually found in serious films about racism or Nazism into the language of B-movie genre cinema, the format almost demands it. Still, it risks becoming a closed loop—one Tarantino might eventually benefit from breaking. That said, before this vendetta trilogy concludes, we can still look forward to something like a giallo-style revenge movie about Indigenous peoples as his next project.

Until that trilogy reaches its end, audiences will continue to enjoy Tarantino’s ingenuity and creative vitality. He remains at the top of his game, managing to disguise the fact that beneath his irreverent, swaggering persona lies a big-hearted liberal who simply grew up watching the “wrong” movies. Instead of Stanley Kramer and Sidney Poitier, he was raised on Mandingo and Navajo Joe. Our gain, really.