The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"can be compared to "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" in so far as the title of that film can perfectly describe my thoughts on the film. And since QT is a fan of the spaghetti western, all the more reason I should break up my review into those three categories. But first...

I'm not going to waste too much space discussing how gifted I think Quentin Tarantino is. Suffice to say, besides "Jackie Brown" (a dull mess), I've found every one of his features to be clever, insightful and wildly entertaining. He channels great performances from his actors and knows how to fashion an exciting (usually wonderfully non-linear) screenplay with cracking-cool, quotable dialogue. Oh, and he loves movies! He appropriates from the best and makes them his own.

All that said, his eighth feature is a towering let down, from the lazy, predicable script to the juvenile, character-interchangeable, N-word-ridden dialogue (with little regard for the period) to the sub-par performances (not wholly the actors' fault, since they didn't have much to play with in terms of dimension and subtext).

This might be a film that the fanboys (and that seems to include a bunch of "critics") think is hip to like. They seem to lap up everything that their filmic superhero, SuperQ, serves up. But I was deeply disappointed and, by the end credits, angry.

"The Hateful Eight" takes place in Wyoming a decade or so after the Civil War, and focuses on the titular gaggle of fucked up killers, cheaters and generally nasty, selfish vermin-like folk that managed to survive the human-devour-and-then-spit-out-human world of the Old West.

Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is a passenger on a stagecoach handcuffed to a nasty bitch of a fugitive, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), hoping to get her to a town called Red Rock and collect the reward on her head. They encounter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), another bounty hunter, as well as Red Rock's new sheriff (who has yet to be sworn in), Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). All four arrive together at Minnie's Haberdashery and take refuge from the growing blizzard.

There, Minnie is curiously absent, as are her usual suspects. Instead, our quartet and their driver (James Parks, a sort of Hateful Ninth) find a Mexican named Bob (Demian Bichir), who claims to have been placed in charge by Minnie, a quietly cantankerous Confederate general (Bruce Dern, doing the Dern to death), a seemingly out of place Brit who turns out to be a hangman (Tim Roth) and Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), the required mysterious cowboy. And there's your eight.

So let's begin with...

The Good

Ultra Panavision 70!
The last film to be shot in this widescreen format was "Khartoum" in 1966, although directors like Paul Thomas Anderson have used the 70mm "scope" style to great effect since. Though Tarantino's film takes place predominantly indoors, he and Oscar-winning director, Robert Richardson ("JFK," "The Aviator," "Hugo") masterfully make use of the screen. It's a gorgeous film to watch... to a point.

Robert Richardson's Cinematography
Exquisite. Evocative. Enough said.

The Exclusive Roadshow Engagement
A return to the "event" releases of decades ago, a slightly longer version of the film will receive a special release on December 31 in 100 theatres thanks to the Weinstein Company, with an overture, intermission and souvenir program, the way "Gone With the Wind," "Ben-Hur," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Cleopatra," were released.

Ennio Morricone's Score (as well as QT's use of music)
Morricone sets the tone perfectly in his Overture and continues to charm and entice, even when the film is letting us down.

Homage
QT's passionate love of westerns and 1970s films and filmmaking is always obvious in every frame of "H8." Besides the spaghetti westerns, I even sensed some "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" here.

Walton Goggins' Kick-Ass Turn
This is the one actor able to transcend the muck and deliver a rambunctious killer performance. How? He steamrolls through Tarantino's mundane babble and finds some room for nuance.

The First Two Hours
While not great or particularly riveting, the first two hours of "Hateful Eight" does a decent job of creating mood and engaging the viewer. Who are these people, and why are they all gathered together? The possibilities prove quite intriguing. Our curiosity is piqued. And then it all goes to shit.

Bringing me to... (SPOILERS from here onward)

The Bad

The Last Third
All that interesting set up goes to hell as Tarantino decides his post- intermission film will be a blood and guts fest in "And Then There Were None" fashion, and that it must top all his past brutality onscreen. So he has no trouble betraying his characters and story.

Kurt Russell's John Wayne Impression
Just stop it. It's distracting.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's Incessantly Annoying Performance
Seriously, if you think this is Awards-worthy acting then you need to reevaluate your status as a cinephile. Every time she got socked in the face, I gleefully grinned. And before you go for my jugular, I am a very big fan of Leigh, and believe she was robbed of Oscar nominations for "Last Exit to Brooklyn," "Georgia," "Mrs. Parker," and "Dolores Claiborne."

It was rumored that Jennifer Lawrence turned this role down. That girl has smarts.

The Screenplay
I don't know how it read on paper, but this is Tarantino's least intelligent, most banal script. He's fleshing out (or not fleshing out) his characters in the most mundane manner. And if he's trying to provoke, with all the racial slurs, it just comes off like a child defiantly spewing obscenities while running from his parents. Look what I can get away with saying!

And, finally...

The Ugly

The Hateful Eight
These people suck. And don't give me that "They're called 'the hateful eight'" crap. Michael Fassbender played pure evil in "12 Years a Slave," as did Ralph Fiennes in "Schindler's List," and I was still transfixed by them. These eight are just repulsive. They feel like Tarantino marionettes that must do and say things at his whim, damn logic and coherence. And I never believed anything they said in their (long-ass, dull) monologues. Worse, I never cared. Why should I, when I knew they were all going to kill each other, anyway? Not because it made any kind of narrative sense, but because it would look so cool in Ultra Panavision 70!

Channing Tatum
Not that he's in any way ugly, but he is trapped in a film that seems to have no use for him. Tatum, besides being sexy as hell, is a damn good actor. To waste him is truly ugly.

The Fate of the Flashback Characters
Post-intermission, we meet Minnie and her gang. And they're truly engrossing characters that I was really enjoying getting to know. And they're almost instantly massacred. Come on! Really? Why create them in the first place?

QT's Misogyny
As much as I didn't love Leigh's performance, I realize much of it had to do with the way she was written, directed and shown to the audience. What should have been a paradoxical figure is turned into a raving, lunatic shrew that, according to the script, deserves all those whacks in the face. And her off-key song, and the way Tarantino films it, is proof he himself loathes her character.

The Rape Monologue
Not ugly because of content (although that argument could be made), but ugly because it, like the film's "important" Lincoln Letter, is probably a falsehood, so why bother? It's oddly careful, ergo superfluous.

QT's Wild Indulgence and Unapologetic Violent Excess
In the end, the mayhem in "H8" is just violence for the sake of violence. And he basks in it and wants us to as well. Blood vomiting, heads being blown off, gruesome hangings, shooting someone in the crotch, eviscerations... just another day at the Cineplex. I get that he likes his violence, but when you kill everyone in such heinous ways, then what's the point?

Tarantino had a good idea about eight wicked Old West survivors being trapped together in a blizzard. He was also edging toward having something substantial to say about race post-Civil War. Had he fleshed out his characters and bothered to go a bit deeper into race relations, this might have been a truly remarkable movie. Instead, it degenerates into a literal bloody mess.