I'm not gonna argue with you about your review. I mean, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. However, I can forgive the amount of times the word "nigger" is used due to the time period. It was pretty much the default term for a black person during that time and wasn't even seen as a slur by the ones who used it.
So I had similar thoughts to the reviewer for a while. However I was watching this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvEgETtPBDI
And thinking about some reviews, and my opinion is slowly changing. The idea is that the film is really about the narratives people use to deal with racism. The films suggesting people are 'accepted' but only when they play roles that make us feel comfortable. Samuel Jackson's character gets to moan and complain at white people, because he allows Leonardo's character to feel like he's a liberal who's kind and enlightened to his slaves.
Characters keep on saying "Keep it funny" as a kind of expression for "lets stick to our roles, please".
The reason why it works for Django being such an undeveloped character is this:
There is one scene where Django shows genuine personality and has a 'character building' moment. And that's right at the end. When he's alone with his wife and there are no white characters left in the film.
Django was still playing a role, throughout the whole film. He was this non-expressive blank slate because he couldn't be sure about even Schultz and so he was playing the role that Schutz wanted him to play. Nothing conflicting, ready to be mentored. And he genuinely liked Schultz sure, but there was always a barrier between them that stopped Django genuinely opening up. It's not exactly Schultz's fault, but Django was there at his grace, not his freedom. If Schultz had for some reason chosen to turn Django in, Django doesn't have the power to stop him.
And it's only in that last scene of the film, when Django is trotting his horse around, laughing, displaying personality, that we get to see real freedom.
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Two Failed Acts and Two Failed Characters
The title is Django Unchained. A main character's name is Django. It doesn't take a math whiz to say, "Hey, this movie's about Django!" It doesn't feel like it, though.
The film opens up with Django being bought by an eccentric German dentist named Schultz, who has a knack for talking. A lot. Very loquaciously, too. Django is the exact opposite. Herein lies one of the film's main problems. It's a standard trope of Westerns, most famously The Good The Bad And The Ugly, that the hero be a soft-spoken mysterious drifter, usually accompanied by a very talkative sidekick. However, the way this film is done, Django feels more like a soft-spoken sidekick than a hero until the final act.
From the get-go, Schultz talks and talks and talks and talks and talks. Almost non-stop right up to his departure at the end of the second act. Django barely has any scenes away from Schultz and interacting with other characters outside of involvement with Schultz, he's a "natural" gunman but requires a training montage for some reason, and practically the only thing the audience knows about him is that he's rebellious and loves his wife very much.
Speaking of his wife, Broomhilda is almost atrociously underwritten. She barely has any lines, and spends the majority of her time onscreen crying in agony and being threatened or abused in some horrible way. Kerry Washington is effective in this role, but it begs the question: Why her? What about this character makes Django so hell-bent to rescue her besides marital vows and some inspirational German fairy-tale Schultz told Django?
The final point of criticism is that the film meanders. The best parts are from when Django and Schultz discover who Broomhilda's new owner is to when Django has that bloody fight scene in Candie's mansion. The entire beginning could have been trimmed down, and the entire ending could have been written differently, with less of an anticlimactic feeling to it. Scenes spent developing characters besides Schultz and the two villains - like, I dunno, our hero - could've been added.
Overall, this was a 5/10 film for me. Not Tarantino's best, but not his worst.
P.S. Yes, to rehash the debate, a certain word was used way too many times in comparison to how little another word commonly used in 1858 was used in the film, like "Negro".