An OK second-tier spaghetti Western, clearly aping the style so inimitably pioneered by Sergio Leone a few years prior.
The movie follows Django, a mysterious and lethal drifter who drags around a coffin everywhere he goes. When Django wanders into a town, he finds himself quickly caught between two feuding groups - one a gang of Mexican revolutionaries and the other a crew of ex-Confederate soldiers. Django rescues a young woman, Maria, from one side, and soon is shifting his allegiances between groups, eventually including a group of bank robbers, to serve his own ends. In the end, he cunningly kills off his adversaries and drags his wounded self off to begin a new life with Maria.
Django is decent enough fare for the genre, but I can't say it spurred any desire to watch more of its ilk. I absolutely love Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" movies, along with his others. But as much as I love them, I also realize how ultimately silly they can be in certain respects, and it's only in the hands of a narrative and cinematic master that one can easily look beyond those films' weaknesses in terms of emotional depth or complexity. Django does a nice job using solid film technique to capture that same hyper-colored-yet-dusty aesthetic of Leone's movies, and it even has a few of the clever plot devices of those earlier movies. But it doesn't all come together or have quite the complete sense of coherence of the originals.
This was apparently a huge movie, though, Maybe not quite as big, worldwide, as Leone's westerns, but big enough to spawn a ton of sequel films, starring quite a few different actors in the lead roles. It really was like a spaghetti western Jame Bond kind of franchise through the 1960s and 1970s, and even hanging on well beyond that, with the most obvious recent incarnation being Quentin Tarantino's version of the character, starring Jamie Foxx. With this in mind, I would recommend it to those who love the look and feel of A Fistful of Dollars and its semi-sequels enough that they want more of the same. For my part, I won't be going out of my way to take in more of them.
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