Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained marked the first spaghetti western directed by a guy who’d used the influence of spaghetti westerns in everything from a kung fu movie to a crime thriller. While it was controversial among some for taking the crash zooms and over-the-top violence of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and placing them in the antebellum-era south, others have praised Django Unchained for using genre tropes to tackle serious issues.
Although Kill Bill is Tarantino’s closest attempt at a straight action movie, there are plenty of action scenes in Django Unchained. So, here are Django Unchained’s 10 Best Action Scenes, Ranked.
Dr. Schultz frees Django
In the opening scene of Django Unchained, Django is being forced across the desert by a couple of white slavers. As the sun goes down, a dentist emerges from the darkness and asks them if he can buy Django.
When they refuse to sell him, Dr. Schultz simply says, “Very well.” In an instant, he drops the gaslight, leaving himself in the pitch black, whips out his pistol, and opens fire. He shoots one of the slavers in the head and crushes the other one with his own horse, leaving the rest of the chain gang to take care of him.
Django tricks the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company into giving him a gun
After the deal at Candyland goes south, Django is captured and sold to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company. However, with his knowledge of where the bodies of Smitty Bacall and the Smitty Bacall Gang can be found, he manages to trick the miners into taking off his chains and giving him a horse and a gun.
As soon as they hand over that revolver, he reneges on the deal and shoots them all dead. The last one, played by Quentin Tarantino himself, is holding a bundle of dynamite, and Django blows him up in a fiery inferno. Then, Django emerges from the billowing smoke to free the other slaves.
The Mandingo fight to the death
One of the most controversial scenes in the movie, the fight to the death between the Mandingo fighters owned by Calvin Candie and a cameoing Franco Nero is brutally violent, even for this movie.
The sound design goes a long way towards creating this brutality. While the most horrendous acts are often depicted just out of the frame or they’re obscured in a closeup, we can hear the fighters’ bones crunching. And all the while, Django sits at the bar, forced to stay in character as a black slaver.
Django and Dr. Schultz shoot an entire gang dead in seconds
There is no cheesy training montage in Django Unchained. Instead, Dr. Schultz lets Django learn the bounty hunting trade on the job over the course of a prosperous winter. When he practices his aim on a snowman, Django turns out to be a natural, earning the nickname “the fastest gun in the South.”
Dr. Schultz is quick to put this into action, as the pair jump out from behind a couple of trees and open fire on an entire gang, killing every single member in a matter of seconds.
Dr. Schultz kills a sheriff
Right after Dr. Schultz frees Django, he takes him into the nearest town for a beer. The bartender panics upon seeing Django in his establishment and flees to get some law enforcement. Dr. Schultz tells him, “Remember, get the sheriff, not the marshal.” When the sheriff arrives right on schedule, Dr. Schultz exits the bar and shoots the sheriff dead in a brilliantly blunt moment.
After killing the sheriff, causing one of the onlooking townspeople to pass out, Dr. Schultz says, “Now, you can get the marshal.” When the marshal arrives, he explains that there was a bounty on the sheriff’s head and he owes him $200.
Django’s bloody rampage on the way to save Broomhilda
After escaping from the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, Django charged across the southern landscape to return to Candyland and save Broomhilda. But along the way, he stopped off to kill Stonecipher and the other trackers as an act of revenge in the name of Dr. Schultz and D’Artagnan.
It’s one of the movie’s glorious squib-fests, with explosions of blood filling the frame every time a gunshot lands on its victim. The scene’s best kill is the guy in the bathtub.
Django and Dr. Schultz blow up Big Daddy’s posse
Quentin Tarantino said that the scene in Django Unchained in which the masked horsemen — described as an early version of the Ku Klux Klan — complain about their masks, is the funniest scene he’s written since the one in Reservoir Dogs in which Joe gives all the crooks their color-coded names.
It’s followed by a breathtaking action sequence in which they raid Dr. Schultz’s stagecoach and find that they’ve been outsmarted. The dentist rigged his own stagecoach with dynamite, and blows it up from afar. Then, he lets Django kill Big Daddy.
Django kills everyone at Candyland after Calvin’s funeral
The final shootout in Django Unchained feels earned. Django and especially Broomhilda have been put through hell by Calvin Candie and his associates, so they deserve everything that comes to them in the movie’s final moments.
Every moment in the set piece is awesome, from Django shooting Billy Crash in the crotch to shooting “Miss Lara” into the other room to “kneecapping” Stephen.
Django and Dr. Schultz kill the Brittle brothers
The Brittle brothers are Django’s first bounty. As he arrives on Big Daddy’s plantation and tracks them down, flashbacks reveal all the horrible things that these brothers have done to Django and Broomhilda. After seeing this, we can’t wait for Django to kill them. Watching Django whip the overseer who once whipped his wife is gruesomely satisfying, shot in glorious slow-motion.
When Dr. Schultz joins him, he takes out the third Brittle brother with his rifle, shooting him off the back of his horse. The symbolism of the blood spattering cotton plants is a little on-the-nose, but it’s an undeniably beautiful shot.
The first shootout at Candyland
Dr. Schultz had secured Broomhilda’s freedom, and all he had to do was shake Calvin Candie’s hand. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he killed Calvin, and was then himself subsequently killed, leaving Django to pick up the bloody pieces. As dozens of armed assailants swarm the house, Django simply opens fire and hopes for the best.
This is one of the grisliest, bloodiest sequences in Tarantino’s oeuvre, as Django uses a couple of guys as human shields and all of the gunfire directed at him blows their already-obliterated corpses to smithereens. Django ends up surrendering when Stephen captures Broomhilda, but not before putting up a hell of a fight.
