Django

Despite its promising premise and impressive production values, Django (2023) falls short due to the lackluster performances of its cast. While the series boasts a talented ensemble, their delivery is wooden and uninspired, failing to bring life to their characters or engage the audience. Despite the best efforts of the writers and directors, the subpar acting ultimately undermines the series' potential, making it difficult to recommend to viewers specially fans of the original movies. Just count the times that the actors rais their heads slowly to express the scene it was hinching and irritating.

Sure there were some elements of previous versions but It's nothing compared to the original Django movies (Between 1966 and 2012). Where Django had a sad and impenetrable face.

This cowboy was invisible.

But it's not.

Assuming you have HDR on your TV and you can see what is happening...

The story is convoluted and the flashbacks not handled very well.

The acting is very variable, even by the recognised names.

While the photography is good, it does not make up for the bad acting. Characters performances vary between wooden to manic.

And the accents. Very poor, especially Ms Rapace, most distracting.

The Django character has appeared in several spaghetti westerns over the last fifty years. This series does follow in the established genre but has sacrificed clarity for pretentiousness.

If they make a remake, remember to turn the lights on.

Normally, I'd post a review against the last episode of the season unless I was sure that it's not going to be renewed, but I'm going to post this here as, even if "Django" is brought back for another run - which doesn't look likely - I don't think I'm going to be around for anymore if it. Not everything has to be sunshine and rainbows, but this is too long and too dour to recommend.

Having left his homestead to fight for the South in the Civil war, Django (Matthais Schoenaerts) returns home to find most of his family dead, he believes though that his daughter survived and begins to search for her. 8 years later he locates Sarah (Lisa Vicari), living with John Ellis (Nicholas Pinnock) who has founded a free city, New Babylon, on land gifted to him. However, Elizabeth Thurman (Noomi Rapace) wants the land returned to her family, and as a devoutly religious person, to see New Babylon wiped from the map.

So, I quite liked the look for the show, though for an Italian production they generally stayed away from the classic Spaghetti Western style heading to Romania for a grittier, muddier look. New Babylon is clearly filmed in an old mine. I didn't think performances were that bad, Rapace has rather a wayward accent, but we're still in the period of mass migration so it could perhaps be excused on those grounds.

It wasn't a fun watch though. I've never seen the film it's based on (Franco Nero does appear in this series) but the plot is very different from what I read on Wikipedia. This story was too long, it might have worked better as a 90-minute film but at ten hours there were too many half-done storylines and repeated plot points to keep me from drifting away every time I watched it. It's pretty grim stuff too, not that explicit, but with a prevailing sadness particularly if, like me, you guess a pivotal plot point before it comes to the fore.

Again, it's for this reason that I don't think I'd settle in for another series.

Noomi rapace actually does suck in her role, what was she thinking?, absolute terrible 'accent', could she really not know this?, is she really this vacuous?, I guess!, many others have said the scenes are too dark, very true, in the dark scenes some of the cast cannot be seen, ?, the writer and the director are terrible, it's just not worthy of watching, kind of a fever dream, funny, the names of those involved in writing and directing seem to be Italian, is this a satire of the old spaghetti westerns?, is that it?, I just gave up in the middle of episode two, skip this disaster of a dumb show.

First of all anyone who knows the landscape and climate of Texas can clearly tell from the first shot the set is NOT in Texas. Too many mountain ranges and the climate is way too wet for Texas. They actually filmed this show in Romania. Secondly, the majority of the characters are European with audacious American accents. It's just not believable. Thirdly, the story is so disjointed, it was hard to follow. The writer and director's attempts to modernize a Western failed because the characters just weren't likeable. Because of that the theme of the evils of religious extremism and racism falls flat. Sorry, I only made it to episode 3 and called it quits.