The Hateful Eight

Well, it has taken eight films -- as his pre-credit marquee gleefully exults -- but I think we've finally reached peak Quentin Tarantino. That is, unless you can somehow conjure up a more QT scenario than having a group of villainous, distrustful and loquacious bounty hunters, murderers and scalawags forced to hole up in a single-room hotel for a night with a raging blizzard outside.

Fans of Tarantino tend to overlook his penchant for pungent violence, his constant play of racial prejudices, and his frequent bouts of self-congratulation because, at his best, he can still draw you into the captivating corners of his obsessions. In this bloody, sadistic, Western showcase, it's as if he has finally released his savagely bestial Id beyond the petty constraints of storytelling and craft. He might go on to make another eight films -- or 18 -- but this will surely go down as one of his least effective.

Shot in glorious 70mm Panavision -- it's not the format's fault that the imagery it depicts here is so decrepit -- we begin with a series of shots of the windy, snow-encased vistas of mountainous Wyoming, where a stagecoach approaches a lone figure sitting atop a pile of frozen bodies. The figure turns out to be Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a very successful bounty hunter looking to take his latest corpse captures up to Red Rocks in order to collect. Inside the stagecoach happens to be another bounty hunter of impressive credentials, John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), so dubbed because of his penchant for bringing his charges in alive to local authorities, just to watch them twist on the rope. It so happens that he's traveling with a very valuable capture, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), worth a cool $10K, also heading up to Red Rocks before a massive blizzard threatens to take them over.

Ruth reluctantly takes Warren into his coach, and then only after recognizing him as someone he had met previously, but it's not too long before they are approached by a second lone figure, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be the newly elected sheriff of Red Rocks. Mannix is headed up there to get sworn in and get his badge. As Warren fought successfully for the Union and Mannix is a long-standing Confederate man, tensions quickly escalate between them, as Domergue eggs them on.

With nowhere else to go to avoid the storm, the party eventually alights on the aforementioned one-room Inn, presided over by a Mexican named Bob (Demian Bichir), whom Warren immediately distrusts. Inside are several more characters: the debonair Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a Brit who claims to be the actual hangman for the area; Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a swarthy fellow whose countenance more than belies his weak cover story; and General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), an elderly former high-ranking officer of the Confederacy.

Having established his swarm of dislikable protagonists and locking them up together for the evening, QT gets to the business of brutally knocking them off one by one. In his more recent films, Tarantino has shown a predilection for long, verbose scenes with characters engaging in lengthy philosophical back-and-forths, slowly building toward a pivot point of extreme violence. Here, he paces scene after scene with such foreplay, studding his film with bodies dispatched in ever more gruesome and bloody concentrations. In this den of vipers, no one appears to be strictly speaking the truth, nor are they looking out for anything but their own best interests.

Clocking in at a completely ridiculous 168 minutes, this grinding murder machine rolls along unabated, testing your will to see it through. Tarantino's films have often felt more than a little insincere, aping the styles and attitudes of films he has adored from afar, but this is the first one that feels so bloody negligible. I was no particular fan of Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, but each had their moments, and a slightly twisted sense of humor to suggest Tarantino was more than in on his own joke. This film offers little of his signature witty repartee and love of expansive characters that has made some of his other work a good deal more tolerable. It turns out, we're all stuck in this molding, drafty room until the credits mercifully roll.

Over the years, QT has had a way of plucking mostly forgotten actors from the scrapheap of obscurity and helping resurrect their careers -- no greater example than what he did for John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, as the actor had been seemingly resigned to making endless Look Who's Talking sequels for the rest of his days. He has stockpiled this film with such former luminaries as Russell, Roth, and the ubiquitous Madsen (who, like many in his stable, has appeared in several QT films), but his real find is Leigh.

Always a fearless actress, Leigh willingly absorbs her character, but we have to watch her getting pummeled, bloodied, kicked, thrown from a moving carriage, drenched with someone else's brain matter, and otherwise abused until she is almost unrecognizable. Near the end of this ordeal, she is shown to be a foul, cackling she-devil, her front teeth busted out, her hair plastered back by gore. Tarantino has long championed female protagonists (his work with Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill films was exemplary, for example), so it's not so easy to write him off as a standard misogynist, but it's hard to ignore the callous disregard he shows the women in this film, all of whom are abused in one way or another.

You could say that QT is an acquired taste, but I believe it's something you're probably born with, for better or worse. His films often push boundaries -- at his best, he can grab a mainstream audience and take them along a thrilling ride of subversive horror -- adding just enough humor, heft and adoration of cinematic history to make his more puerile flights of fancy palatable, but with this film, he's clearly lost his way.

MovieStyle on 01/01/2016