The Hateful Eight

Going into this, I'd only seen three Tarantino movies. My first was Pulp Fiction, which is a masterwork of filmmaking and storytelling. My second was Reservoir Dogs, which I found tedious and forgettable. And the third was Kill Bill Vol. 1, which I found loathsome, difficult to sit through, and an insult to the movies Tarantino claimed he was "paying homage" to. I didn't know Hateful Eight was one of his until I looked closr at it on Netflix. I wanted to watch it because it had a hell of a cast, and Kurt Russell in a western is usually a recipe for success (Tombstone and Bone Tomahawk are ***** movies in my eyes). I should've known that the Tarantino factor would outweigh the qualities the actors bring. The actors really are the reason to watch this movie, because Russell, Samuel L. Jackson. Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, and Bruce Dern are the reasons to watch this. If I need to tell you they're phenomenal, then you just don't know movies. Every one of them is at the top of their game. I wish the same could be said for Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michael Madsen, who are given very little to do here. Madsen growls and gruffs his way through a performance he could do in his sleep, but there's just not enough meat on the bone to make his role anything more than a cliche western tough guy. Leigh isn't given anything to do besides be irritating until the last 10 minutes, and even then, it's not really character development. The script criminally under-utilizes both of these excellent actors. The biggest sins, though, are reserved for Tarantino's hands. Tarantino's ego is on full display here, turning in a monstrous, bloated, self-indulgent movie that thinks more is better at all times. There is enough material here for a solid (if unremarkable, but more on that in a moment) 2 hour movie, maybe 2:15, but Tarantino inflates this movie's run time with ponderous, unnecessary shots, scenes that add up to nothing, and dialogue that fills time. This movie was badly in need of an editor who had the balls to say no to Tarantino's excesses. It is that length that underscores and fuels every other flaw in this movie, because you're stuck with them for far, far too long. There's the total lack of character, for instance. Having just watched Lifeboat before this, it's hard not to make comparisons, as they're both about strangers stuck together in an isolated circumstance, and Lifeboat mops the floor with this movie. Lifeboat has fleshed out characters, which gives you reason to care about them and their situation, and to be invested when they pair off into alliances and rivalries. Hateful Eight has exactly what it says on the tin -- eight people who are pretty hard to like (except it actually has nine, so they couldn't even get that right). They're all hardcases and they all have ugly sides to them that make them hard to have a connection to. Nobody has an arc. Nobody changes or grows. Nobody learns anything. It's just terrible people doing terrible things. Literally the best person is a bounty hunter that, as a soldier for the Union, burned down the fort where he was held prisoner and let everybody inside die, including fellow Union soldiers. It goes downhill from there. Speaking of the Civil War, hey, you like racial epithets? Be prepared to hear the N-word a couple hundred times. I know the movie takes place after the Civil War, and there's a few former Confederate characters, so a little might make sense, but Hateful Eight abuses it. It uses the word like a teenager trying to be shocking with profanity, injecting it into every sentence, wherever possible. The dialogue is torturous to get through, and being said by terrible people makes it all the worse. But then, to top it all off is Tarantino's love of hyper-violence. For all the guff Pulp Fiction gets, it is not nearly as violent or bloody as people remember. But Kill Bill marked a turning point, where shock value became more important than content. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but sorry, it's my truth; Kill Bill was made by a fucking moron who did not understand the thing he proclaimed to love, and made a mockery of it with his hyper-violent lakes and geysers of blood. Hateful Eight doubles down on this; every gunshot produces six foot rooster tails of claret, tears off limbs, and makes heads explode. I'm a horror fan, I love me a good kill scene. But when Jason Voorhees puts a meat cleaver in some unsuspecting teenager's face, there isn't enough blood to fill up a fountain in a city park. Hateful Eight's violence is preposterous, which should make it hilarious, but it ends up feeling cynical. And instead of having a shocking effect, the volume of it is so stupid and distracting, it kicked me out of the moment, and by the halfway point, I was numb to it. Now, take all that .. the lack of characters, the excessive violence, and the unending profanity and racial slurs, and do that for three hours. THREE. HOURS. Any chance this movie has of being even perversely entertaining gets snuffed out by the relentless, seeming endless barrage of crass negativity. I can only enjoy so much of a movie when it seems hellbent on overwhelming me with nastiness and misery. I can tell you that the acting is the shining light of this movie, but I can't, in good conscience, recommend the movie on that basis alone unless you can endure the parade of violence and racism on display here. I can, however, rest comfortably knowing once and for all that Tarantino is not a filmmaker I ever want to bother with again.