Good luck making sense of this rambling Django remake
Can we just stop remaking things? Django (Sky Atlantic) is “based on” Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western. You know the original: it started with Franco Nero – he of the ice blue eyes – arriving in town, dragging a coffin behind him. The villains were Confederates and Mexicans, the women were prostitutes with lashings of sexy eyeliner, and rewatching it today will remind you why it is a cult classic.
The new Django also starts with a mysterious figure in a hat hauling a coffin. But guess what? It’s a woman! The writers think this is a mighty clever twist. She’s not Django, though. He’s still a man, and played by Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts as if he’s taken a wrong turn from the set of Lord of the Rings. Where Nero smouldered, Schoenarts just growls a lot and looks in desperate need of some shampoo.
The mud-drenched, one-horse town of the original is now a community called New Babylon, populated by former slaves and founded after the end of the Civil War as a place where every human being can be free and equal. It’s also a place where lots of white people come to watch bareknuckle fighting, for reasons that aren’t quite clear. Lots of things in Django aren’t quite clear.
They include Noomi Rapace’s accent, which I think is an attempt at sounding Texan by way of Sweden. She plays “The Lady”, who wears pastel dresses by day but by night wears an all-black disguise to visit her local brothel, where she stabs a prostitute in the throat and torches the joint. I think that’s because she’s very religious. Like I say: not quite clear.
Django has turned up to find his daughter, who helped to found New Babylon with a former slave whom she’s about to marry. On her wedding day, she rides off on her horse wearing a white wedding veil with a Djangostyle black hat on top of it. I think this is an homage to the original film, and it looks ridiculous.
Quentin Tarantino gave us a very different take on the original in Django Unchained, but at least he had a clear and detailed vision of what he was doing and why. This series is underwhelming and over-complicated. Having an international cast (it is an Italian-french co-production) contributes to the lack of coherence. Or maybe the dislocated, dystopian feel is deliberate. I couldn’t tell you.
If you’re looking for a revisionist Western with a strong female role,
The English on iplayer is far superior. And if you’re just looking for a good Spaghetti Western, try watching the 1966 film again. It’s pretty good.
To the list of British things that baffle the rest of the world – Yorkshire puddings, the cost of London Underground journeys, queuing – we can now add Danny Dyer. Netflix has made its first British quiz show, called Cheat, meaning that our foremost geezer now has a global audience.
Technically, he co-hosts it alongside comedian and recent Strictly
contestant Ellie Taylor, but the sheer force of Dyer obliterates anyone within a 20-metre radius, and so this is really his show. Even the episodes of Cheat
are named after his turns of phrase: Scumbags, The Lot of ’Em; Starting to Get a Bit Naughty Now; A Bunch of Absolute Wrong ’uns; He’s Got the Right Hump. I promise I am not making this up.
Unfortunately, Cheat is such a terrible game show that Dyer can’t save it. What Netflix should have done is somehow buy the rights to The Wall,
a brilliant BBC show in which Dyer bellows at a giant wall as if he’s asking it outside for a fight. Cheat is both boring and confusing. Contestants have to answer a series of questions but can cheat by pressing a secret button which brings up an answer on their screen. The winning contestant is the one who correctly guesses which of their rivals is cheating most often. There is a tortuous subset of rules governing it all.
Dyer commits fully to this, because that’s what Danny Dyer does and we can only love him for it. He speaks in Dyer-isms. “The rules: they’re double simple.” Win the game and “you will leave here dripping in dosh”. Someone suggests Gogglebox as an answer. “Or was that Goggleb------s?” Dyer asks.
At one point he acknowledges the international audience by asking someone to say something in Korean, but the chances of this becoming a global hit are slim to nil. Hit Netflix game shows are the ones in which the game and its rules are so simple that you could watch it with the sound off: Is It Cake? (guess whether this item is real or made of cake) or Floor is Lava
(don’t fall off the obstacle course, because we’re pretending the floor is lava). Whoever commissioned Cheat was a right mug.
Django ★★ Cheat ★