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Quentin Tarantino Review Day Eight

Published

11 years ago

January 8, 2016

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Hanging’s Too Good For It

♦ With the release of Hateful Eight in the UK today 8 January, we have reached the end of our look at the career of Quentin Tarantino. Here’s our review of that very film

The Hateful Eight

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Stars: Kurt Russell, Samuel L Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, Walton Goggins

Hateful Eight came out at the end of last year and it hits cinemas at the beginning of this month. So what has Tarantino, now a director with nearly twenty-five years of experience under his belt, learnt? Hateful Eight opens strongly, as does most of the director’s work. In a snowy Wyoming expanse, we meet bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell), who stops to pick up a new passenger for his coach, former Civil War soldier Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson). Ruth is not alone as he is transporting his bounty, ruthless criminal Daisy Domergue (Jason Leigh), for an appointment at the end of a rope. The coach picks up another passenger, Sheriff Chris Mannix (Goggins), on his way to take up a new post as the law in a new city.

The coach is delayed in a cabin thanks to the weather where the four meet another quartet of questionable individuals, including former US confederate general Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and oleaginous Englishman Oswaldo Mowbray (Tim Roth). Forced to sit out the inclement weather, the action slowly unfolds and the viewer eventually begins to form a bigger picture about what is actually going on. Hateful Eight is basically a locked room mystery with a western twist – High Plains Drifter meets And Then There Were None. Clocking in at two and three quarter hours running time, Hateful Eight suffers from the worst excesses of Tarantino’s recent efforts. Yes it does look beautiful and yes that is Ennio Morricone on the score here but the dialogue is overly theatrical, the pacing is glacially slow and as with his other recent films like Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has created a potentially intriguing scenario but is clueless as to how to resolve it in a dramatically interesting fashion.

So it all degenerates into a very bloody gunfight which feels more like a seventies zombie film than a western. The mystery element here is very cack-handed, and when the audience gets the big reveal in the last act, Tarantino has forfeited any goodwill the viewer should feel towards the film because the running time is excessive. There is probably a decent 100 minute film hiding here among the flab and excess but Tarantino still hasn’t learnt that less is more. In terms of the cast, Jackson is reliably good as is Goggins, now a Tarantino regular, while Russell is excellent. Roth however is annoying. Goggins is probably the only sympathetic character here, something else which makes it almost impossible to love the Hateful Eight. The eighth film from Tarantino sees the director disappear up his own fundament yet again in an overwrought pastiche of other people’s work. The early promise of his first few films has, it would seem, disappeared in a puff of self-important smoke. The Hateful Eight is a film that has nothing to offer thematically and not much more in terms of story, all the while wasting the combined acting talent of what on paper is an excellent ensemble. It is hard to believe that this is the same man who made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown.

JOEL MEADOWS