Way back in 1992 there appeared a hot new indie flick called "Reservoir Dogs" by a then-unknown video-rental clerk turned director called Quentin Tarantino. This newcomer's knack was to take a classic genre movie — the heist flick — and pump it full of gabby and intensely quotable dialogue, multiple cinephile references, a hipper-than-hip soundtrack and a squirm-inducing torture scene.
Some two decades later, Tarantino is arguably still making the same film. True, "Django Unchained" is riffing on 1960s-'70s spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation, and both budget and running time have become more bloated (as have expectations), but the formula is pretty much the same, right down to the now-requisite torture scene and the Tourette's-like use of the "N" word.
Set in 1858 in the antebellum American South, "Django Unchained" follows dentist/bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx), the escaped slave who becomes his partner in gunning down wanted-dead-or-alive outlaws. Schultz's deal with Django is that if he works with him for a time, come spring, he will help Django track down his wife, Broomhilda, who's fallen into the clutches of slimy plantation-owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, in his first evil nutter role) and his "Uncle Tom" steward Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who lords it over the rest of the slaves.