The Hateful Eight:
Some ten years after the American Civil War, eight strangers are stranded in an intense blizzard at Minnie's Haberdashery, a small and cozy little cottage inn in the middle of nowhere. One of these men, John "The Hangman" Ruth, a notorious bounty hunter who always brings in his prisoners to hang as opposed to just killing them on sight, is transported vile murderess Daisy Domergue to hang in the town of Red Rock. However, he and his newfound friend Major Marquis Warren begin to suspect one of the tenants in this small cottage is not who they say they are, and may be planning to break Domergue free and kill the rest of them.
Tarantino returns to the Western genre with a more contained story than in Django Unchained but with a runtime just as long. The limited locations and smaller cast make this feel more like a play (Tarantino even proposed adapting it into one), and sometimes this does make it feel longer than it is.
The cast, featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Dana Gourrier, Zoe Bell, Lee Horsley, and Gene Jones (most of whom are Tarantino regulars), are fantastic, infusing humor, horror, and wit into every scene. There is one final, surprise cast member whose name appears in the opening credits, whose cameo seems reminiscent of Jonah Hill's in Django in just how unexpected it is. All of the characters are fairly hateable (duh), even by Tarantino's standards of sordid characters, but towards the end you start to root for two in particular who have had the most arc out of anyone and the film does an excellent job of shifting your empathy between characters.
The score by Ennio Morricone is phenomenal, evoking Morriconne's own earlier work, and all this at Morriconne's ripe age of 87. This score also features unused tracks from his score for John Carpenter's The Thing (also starring Kurt Russell and featuring characters stuck in a blizzard), which fit surprisingly well for this film. There were a number of shots and scenarios that seemed similar to The Thing, which, knowing Tarantino, was most probably intentional.
While this film still falls back on Tarantino's tropes and doesn't really see him mature or progress as a storyteller (something I was kind of hoping for), I cannot deny it is immensely entertaining and although the violence is more few-and-far-between here than in his other films, the final showdown is spectacularly violent, although a little disappointing considering how good the first two acts were. The intermission was a nice touch, though my theater didn't actually pause for the 15 minutes intermission, but just kept going, making the narrator (Tarantino himself) explaining what happened in "the 15 minutes since we left our characters" at that point during the film potentially very confusing to other audience members who didn't hear there was supposed to be an intermission.
Tarantino still delivers his trademark long, sharply witted dialogue, now mostly free of pop culture references, so he's matured in that way I suppose. The only problem is it seems that he is getting a little bit self-indulgent, and letting his dialogue go on a bit too long to the point where I could point out what fat could be trimmed to make the film more enjoyable. He also takes such a long time setting up each character that the murder mystery doesn't even begin until the third act, and instead of becoming a complex game of cat-and-mouse with the killer, ti quickly devolves into the type of bloodbath that Tarantino relishes so much.
A character is shot in the groin in the film's final act, something that made me realize that Tarantino seems to have almost as much of a fetish for gratuitous groin shots as he does for feet. Seriously, he does it in most of his movies, it's almost a strange motif.
The Hateful Eight isn't as classic nor as entertaining as Tarantino's earlier works, nor even Django, but is still an immensely enjoyable spaghetti western throwback with fun moments, splattery, gore-soaked action scenes, a diverse soundtrack and score, and some terrific dialogue. Though the lack of nominations in comparison to his last film should clue you in to how this film stacks up to it. 8/10 stars (currently, may decrease to a 7 or even a 6 if I watch it again).
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