The Hateful Eight review

Quentin Tarantino is a writer/director whose best work finds a harmony between both disciplines. His work is often stylish and idiosyncratic and brings attention to the process of whatever it is that distinguishes his filmmaking from everyone else. His scripts are often talky and verbose, with many extended dialogue sequences and as a director he dresses up his screenplays with quirky music choices, active camera work and shuffled, non-linear editing. In short, he doesn’t mind reminding his audience that they are watching a movie with a capital M. Quentin’s latest film “The Hateful Eight” is an ultra-violent, Agatha Christy-esq mystery masquerading as a western, and while it contains elements of his most patient and deliberate work as a filmmaker, it awkwardly struggles to negotiate between Tarantino the writer and Tarantino the director.

Currently there are two different versions of “The Hateful Eight” playing in theaters, a theatrical cut that plays continuously and a limited version that’s projected from 70 millimeter film stock with a five minute overture and a ten minute intermission. Both versions run pretty close to three hours, and most of the film’s running time is devoted to flowery dialogue set-pieces that build to a blood splattered third act.

Its post-civil war 19^th century America and Hangman John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting a wanted murdurer named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock where she is to be killed by the state for her crimes. While traveling through the snow-covered mountains of Wyoming, he picks up black bounty hunter named Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and an ex-rebel soldier named Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Both Warren and Mannix have a war-time reputation that precedes them and has followed them into Ruth’s carriage. Together, they seek shelter from an unforgiving blizzard at a remote cabin supply shop known as Minnie’s Haberdashery.  There they meet a another motley crew of character’s that includes a British born hangman named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a Southern General named Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and an all-too-quiet cowboy named Joe Gage (Michael Madsen).

Many things about this situation seem strange to Ruth and Warren, as Minnie is nowhere to be found, the door is broken from the inside and the man running the haberdashery is an unknown Mexican who goes by the name Bob (Damian Birchir). The two conclude the one or more of these men are secretly working for Daisy Domergue and that an attack on their group is eminent, and because this is a Tarantino film, that’s exactly what happens.

Like his debut feature “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Hateful Eight” is essentially a chamber play in which a small cast of characters are trying to weed out a mole within the group. But this film is twice the length and bejeweled in a number of indulgent cinematic fetishes. The movie was shot by Bob Richardson in an ultra-wide cinemascope frame, and during the opening sequences through the snowy mountains the establishing vistas are magnificent to look at. This choice makes less sense when the other two thirds of the film enclosed in a single interior setting, where close-ups and quick edits are more widely utilized for the storytelling.  Legendary composer Ennio Marconi’s original score for the film is memorable and used to good effect in building tension and creating a mood for the film's sense of snowbound isolation and paranoia, and yet Tarantino still insists on dropping in moments of contemporary rock and pop music, which often clangs against Marconi’s compositions.  There’s a tonally jarring flashback sequence in the middle that could have been cut all together and at one point, for no other reason than he likes to hear himself talk, Quentin provides needless narration that overlays competently shot visual exposition.

Despite these issues, I appreciate the minimal approach to the story and setting and there's a subversive edge to how the narrative eventually escalates into a full-on gore-fest by its end.  The movie mediates Tarantino’s classical influences with his exploitation irony, acting as bridge somewhere between Howard Hawk’s “Rio Bravo” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” The script's many discussions about race and civil war allegiances are fascinating and politically messy in way that other films usually try hard to avoid and they play out within the character arcs in unexpected ways. As you can expect from this filmmaker, the dialogue is well written as pros and contains thorny quotables, but it’s the stagey monologues and constant speechifying that gets in the way of the story, causing the film’s tension as a thriller to relax.

“The Hateful Eight” undeniably entertaining and its by far Tarantino’s darkest and meanest film to date. As a formally experimental piece of pop cinema it’s commendable, but it’s too overwritten and undisciplined to work as the crackling mystery it needs to be.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about "The Hateful Eight" and the films of Tarantino on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.