Django TV review — convention-challenging Western will divide viewers

The prospect of a masculinity-probing, race-conscious, sexually-fluid Western will divide viewers before they’ve even started watching. But though the world in which Django takes place is more diverse, it is hardly sanitised. Sky’s 10-part series is hostile and violent — the only bleeding hearts here are ones with bullets lodged in them.

The year is 1872 but Django uses the framework of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 cult movie to tell a tale that feels contemporary. The setting is New Babylon, a fictional gated community for outsiders built within a Texan crater by former slave John Ellis (Nicholas Pinnock). All are welcome, and all are free to indulge their vices. Is it still a progressive utopia if it invites people to bet on bare-knuckle fights to the death?

One such pugilist is Django (Matthias Schoenaerts). A greasy-haired, sad-eyed drifter, he enters the ring shielded by a fatalistic resignation to whatever life, or his opponent, will throw at him. He wins the bout, but is summarily expelled from New Babylon by Ellis, who suspects that this mysterious stranger may pose a threat. He’s not wrong. Django has arrived in town to seek out long-lost daughter Sarah (Lisa Vicari), who happens to be Ellis’s fiancée.

The women of Django do not exist to be protected or competed over by men. Nor are they artificially heroised. While Sarah is given agency and authority, the show’s other female lead is a God-fearing, gun-toting force of merciless cruelty known as “The Lady” (Noomi Rapace). We first encounter this crusader against New Babylon’s sexual liberation and racial equality leading a grisly massacre at a brothel.

This knowingly provocative scene (set to the incongruous sounds of Édith Piaf) brings a touch of Tarantino-esque showmanship to a series that might have benefited from more of the wit, flair and brio found in the latter’s similarly Corbucci-influenced film, Django Unchained.

The stilted dialogue and unconvincing accents may be an inevitable byproduct of Django being an English-language, Franco-Italian co-production led by a pan-European cast playing Americans. There’s less justification, though, for the slack pacing, muddled, flashback-heavy plotting and stagy shoot-outs.

Tension can still be found in the complex relationships between Django and Sarah, Ellis and The Lady, and, more compellingly, within individual characters, who are internally torn apart by contradictory identities and emotions. Django similarly fluctuates between brutality and tenderness, conviction and ambiguity, renewal and canon. Too often, however, it finds itself caught between good ideas and flawed execution.

★★★☆☆

On Sky Atlantic from March 1 at 9pm and on Sky thereafter

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