The Hateful Eight is a downright cathartic affair. It’s both a chance for writer/director Quentin Tarantino to wind himself down to his most essential elements, and the chance for us — the viewer — to embrace all the pulpy, delicious irreverent eccentricities that began to get bloated in his last two features. Sure, in many respects, Tarantino’s playing it a little safe — and a tad familiar —with his eighth feature. The cabin-based comedic western mystery has odes of Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained packed inside. The elements of which are easy to notice — and pick apart, if you want to get critical. But Tarantino isn’t trying to reinvent his wheel here, especially at this point in his career. Rather, he’s celebrating the tendencies that often get him criticized, letting him push his creative freedoms (even when they might be a little too indulgent for their own good at times) and giving himself the platform to celebrate the richness of cinema in the way he feels it’s most deserved and earned: in glorious 70mm presentation — to let every intimate, revealing detail be shown at its magnificently radiant fullness.
And that’s why it’s not only one of the previous year’s best, but one of the writer/director’s most fulfilling films to date.
The setup seems fairly simple at first. Bounty hunter and former union officer Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), transporting three corpses to get his reward in the town of Red Rock, winds up without a horse to ride on and finds refuge in the passing stagecoach of fellow bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell). Inside his ride is a bounty of his own, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) — whom he’s also bringing to Red Rock to collect the $10,000 bounty over her head. Though the reward comes with the fugitive dead or alive, John likes to bring them in breathing. He wants to make sure the hangman gets his work too — or so he says — and that’s why he gets his nickname of choice. As they continue to cross through the snowy terrain on the verge of a blizzard, they wind up with a four rider in their carriage: Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims that he'll be appointed sheriff in their destination when he reaches town. With no star on his uniform, and without any paperwork to prove his credentials, they have to take his word on his position. But as they walk their way through the worsening weather, they’ll have to reserve their misjudgment towards a few other strangers.
As the blizzard only gets harsher, the mismatch gain of foes winds up staying the night — and subsequent few days, if they can make it — inside the distant hillside cabin of Minnie’s Haberdashery. Locked inside the quarters is not Minnie herself, though, but rather a collective of various other oddballs. Those would include Bob (Demián Bichir), a Mexican who claims to be taking over the lodge in Minnie’s absence, Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock himself, Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a quiet cowboy lurking in the corners penning his memoirs and General Sanford “Sandy” Smithers (Bruce Dern), a former Confederate general who quickly doesn’t take to Warren’s appearance. As tension brews worse than the coffee made by Bob, secrets are easily revealed, guns are taken out of their holders and blood is shed. Nothing too surprising, and nothing Tarantino fans wouldn't expect. But, of course, it’s never just about the plot with the director. It’s all about the presentation and, of course, that’s where the filmmaker shines yet again.
When talking about said presentation, one should naturally expect to talk about the glorious 70mm spectacle. It's as rich and grandiose as you’d expect, with the landscapes all beautifully displayed and the fantastic designs in the Haberdashery themselves giving the production designers their full due. But that’s simply one piece of the puzzle here. Proven more so than ever, what makes Tarantino’s films so luxurious in-and-of-themselves comes from their pacing. Having twisted and tangled narrative structures for decades since Pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eight presents the director at his most brazenly confident.
The way everything unfolds — without getting too deeply into spoilers — is supremely masterful in how it presents everything you need to know without having everything come across too obvious or bluntly. It’s evident what’s about to go down, but in true Tarantino fashion, it’s always a mystery as to how exactly point A will land at point Z. And that’s especially where the fun begins to emerge throughout the three-hour running time. Having seen the film twice, the layers in which Tarantino presents everything is supremely rich in their sophistication. Though the dialogue may deride into the filmmaker’s knee-jerk tendencies, there’s hardly any questioning his growth as a director. It's also his most naturally theatrical effort to date, and it'll be a great deal of fun to see him adapt this work to the stage in due time.
It would be easy to consider The Hateful Eight his most Hitchockian effort, particularly for how well he sets up the pieces around his dollhouse only to let them fall like dominoes into bloody, gleeful deranged fashion. But there’s truly something ominous and consistently haunting about Tarantino’s latest. Etched with leer thanks to an original score from masterful composer Ennio Morricone — the renowned man who previously worked on the likes of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and John Carpenter’s The Thing remake, to name just a few — it dispels something foreboding and looming through its shallow wooden sectors. Everything is laid out for you, waiting as you catch up to its momentum. But it’s not impatient about its intentions. In true Tarantino fashion, everything builds at a delirious, sometimes maddening halt. The payoff comes when it’s damn ready to come, and it’s not afraid to linger on the characters and take its sweet time to come up with memorable dialogue, likably detestable characters and buckets of blood packs in the action.
In many ways, it’s that bunker scene of Inglorious Basterds stretched into three magnificently tantalizing hours. Sure, that’s hard to dispute. But it’s all about the build-up, not the release — as Tarantino has known for so long — and if the ride to the destination is worth the payoff, then it’s worth all the meandering and putzing around that it took to get to what you really wanted to see. And when that comes, it’s not only justified but deliciously earned. Like a fine course meal that gets more and more delicious with each savory bite until the chocolate-covered dessert, Tarantino’s going for pure carnage by the final reel. While it runs the risk of being repetitive, not just by the terms of Tarantino’s filmography but what’s come through the film itself, the now-veteran filmmaker always finds a way to make it all-the-more uproarious as it can be and as lethally vengeful as he can make it. Is it mean-spirited? In a sense, but not without reason. These are characters designed to be lovably hateful (as the title suggests) and we want to go on this malicious ride.
By now, Tarantino expects people to know whether or not they like his films. Even if people themselves don’t know, he’s taken the liberty here to let them know — fair and square — where it stands. The trademarks are all here: the modern music cues, the long-winded monologues, the over-the-top violence, as mentioned before. If you like or don’t, Tarantino doesn’t care. He’s making the movies he wants to make, and though such self-indulgences are often toxic, it fits exactly in his wheelhouse. With grit on its teeth, blood pulsating through its veins and a thirst for vengeance and defiance at every turn, The Hateful Eight is Tarantino at his most purely uncompromised. It spits in your face and doesn’t give a damn how mad you get about it. It wipes the blood off its hands just so they can get dirty again, and it’s always fun to see how messy it can get as it goes along. It’s a vicious, malicious, rude, angry movie, with fine performances all around (especially from Leigh, Russell, Jackson and Goggins, not to mention one certain A-lister who pops up well after the intermission). It’s a grand time at the movies, and there's very little for Tarantino fans to hate about this one.