2. Dr. King Schultz - Django Unchained
Django Unchained is director Quentin Tarantino's dual meditation on slavery and the spaghetti western genre, which basically means that it's his bloodiest movie to date, and there are around 456 utterances of the N-word (in, like, the first scene). The plot, set two years before the American Civil War, concerns Django, a slave played by Jamie Foxx, who teams up with charismatic wordsmith come German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) so they can rescue his wife, Broomhilda, from a ruthless plantation owner named Calvin Candie, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio with an accent. To achieve their goal, Dr. Schultz - who we learn is great at making up brilliant, theatrical plans that
always work - decides that he and Django must disguise themselves as Mandingo traders (of which Candie is super passionate about) so they can get invited to the plantation where his wife his being held prisoner. This part of the plan works. The next part of the plan is for Django and Dr. Schultz to fake interest in Mandingo fighting whilst subtly pursuing their true objective. Over dinner, Dr. Schultz brings up the matter of Broomhilda, and offers to buy her from Candie (he cites her ability to speak German as the reason he wants her so badly), who obliging accepts. Why wouldn't he? But then Candie rumbles their plot, because Samuel L. Jackson is the smart one in this movie, and Schultz gets killed when he goes temporarily insane and shoots Candie. Around fifty or sixty people die during this part of the movie, after which Django is tied up, tortured, and eventually sent off to reprise his slave days. Django eventually finds himself in a position where he can kill even more people, though (which he does), and rescues Broomhilda. Despite the fact that the mission succeeds overall, why the heck did Dr. Schultz conjure up such a convoluted and unnecessarily dangerous plan in the first place? Surely it would have been far easier to approach Candie and offer to buy Broomhilda outright for a huge sum of money? We already know that all Candie cares about is money, anyway, given that - even though he figures out their real agenda - he
still lets them buy Broomhilda from him. And it's even simpler than that, really, given that Dr. Schultz has a great reason to want Broomhilda in the first place - she speaks German, and that's sure to be something of a rarity in the 19th century antebellum south. Schultz could've likely posed as a Mandingo trader on his own (and left Django out of it completely, since his prescene only attracts attention anyway), mentioned that he'd heard rumours of a German-speaking slave, played to Candie's ego, and had Broomhilda out of Candieland in the space of a few hours. One could argue that, yes, Django would never even have been able to get even close to Broomhilda if Schultz hadn't freed him in the first place, but the good doctor makes the list purely because his "great plan" was so batshit crazy, it's a surprise than absolutely
anybody made it out of this story alive.