The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight is nearly three hours of Quentin Tarantino dialogue, interrupted by busts of incredibly strong and graphic Quentin Tarantino violence.  It's a good thing that the dialogue and violence are as good as some of the stuff he's produced, otherwise the movie would be incredibly tedious.  Maybe it still is, just a little.  It's certainly longer than it needs to be.  But there's so much to admire here, it kind of feels bad to complain.

The movie is essentially a very dark western crossed with an Agatha Christie mystery.  It's set primarily in one location - in this case, a snowbound cabin that looks like it's seen better days, especially the door, which needs to be nailed shot with shoddy boards in order to keep out the blizzard raging outside.  Within the setting are a group of people who probably have no business being in the same room with each other.  The only thing they have in common is that the blizzard has made it impossible to travel, and they're stuck here together.  Some of the guys eye the others suspiciously.  Some keep to themselves.  One of them (Samuel L. Jackson) seems more suspicious of everyone else than the others, and as we learn later, with good reason.  The people gathered have their differences, but they agree to be peaceful while they're trapped here.  Then some of them turn up dead by reasons I will not explain here.  Now everyone's even more suspicious of everyone else.  Someone's trying to knock them off, and they're not going to wait until the suspect identifies him or herself before they start trying to bump each other off out of sheer paranoia.

The movie is divided into five chapters, with the first two being devoted to a stage coach making its way to the snowbound cabin.  Besides the driver, the only people on board is a bounty hunter named John "the Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), and his recent capture - an outlaw named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) with a bounty of $10,000 on her head.  Daisy has a black eye when we first see her, and given how John is prone to violence if she even bothers to open her mouth, we can see how she got it.  Their plan is to stop at the cabin for lodgings to wait out the coming storm on their way into town where Daisy will face justice.  Along the way, they pick up two passengers who have run into bad luck in the snow.  The first is the Samuel L. Jackson character, Major Marquis Warren.  He has a violent and notorious past, and carries a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln in his coat pocket at all times. (They were apparently close friends in the past.) Further along the trail, they meet Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a young man who may or may not be the new Sheriff of the town that they all happen to be headed toward for one reason or another.

The first 40 or so minutes of the film depicts these four people in the coach making their way to the cabin.  It gives us plenty of time to admire Tarantino's signature dialogue, the performances, and the beautifully shot winter landscape.  While some of the shots are lingered on a bit longer than necessary, we're still intrigued by these strangers from different walks of life that have been brought together.  When they arrive at the cabin, we're introduced to the rest of the main cast, including Bob the Mexican (Demian Bichir), who claims that the previous owner of the lodge has gone up North to look after their mother and left the place for him to run, an executioner named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a quiet and steely eyed cowboy named Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and elderly Confederate war hero General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern).  These are the men who will be trapped together during the whole bloody mess that follows. 

If I'm being a little vague, that's only because The Hateful Eight is largely a murder mystery, as the plot slowly unravels.  There are some genuine surprises, as Tarantino has never exactly been the type to follow the mold.  The first half of the film when he is introducing the characters is probably the weakest half.  Things pick up as night begins to fall on the cabin.  To be more precise, things begin to pick up when Jackson gets to deliver a very long and electrifying monologue to one of the other characters, which is a combination of tension and thrills, and Tarantino's trademark wicked humor.  From this point on, the movie seldom slows down.  It's kind of a rocky start.  Yes, the dialogue is as good as ever, but there's little to keep things moving other than the performances.  If you can get past it, you will be rewarded with a very tense film.  This is a movie that likes to play with its audience.  It lulls you into thinking you know what's coming next, only to add some surprises.  So many surprises, in fact, that the movie actually has to backtrack to before the story began, and explain just what exactly is going on.  It sounds complicated in theory, but this movie knows how to make it fun.

This movie is all about the audience playing a game along with the characters about who is telling the truth, who has more secrets in their past than they let on, and who is secretly trying to kill off everyone else.  And when the murders do start happening, the movie throws such shocking and graphic violence up on the screen, it can be hard to watch.  I can understand how this may turn off some viewers.  I will admit to turning my head away from some of the death scenes, and the amount of detail shown.  But it does not linger on the violence.  Yes, it's shocking and often quite morbid, but the movie uses it as a jolt of suspense.  I've heard some people claim that this is the most violent movie Tarantino has ever made, which would be saying something for sure.  The violence is certainly hard hitting, especially when it starts up.  But like all great filmmakers, Tarantino knows how to use violence to help tell his story, rather than distract or dominate it.

Besides, there's quite a lot to love here, from the performances (Russell, Jackson and Leigh are the standouts here), to the music score by Ennio Morricone, which brings to mind not only the composer's own classic scores, but many others from the classic Western era that this film is trying to replicate.  And while the movie does sag a little during the early going, it greatly picks up as it goes along, and becomes a greatly intense and claustrophobic thriller.  This is what ultimately makes The Hateful Eight stand out in my mind.  While I don't quite admire it as much as some of the director's past films, once it really picks up and moves, it's as intense as any movie we had in 2015.  If the first half seems overly slow and safe, that's only the movie lulling you into a false state of comfort before things really get wild and messy, as well as bloody.  It's not until you look back on the film that you realize what the first half was trying to do.

Looking over other reviews of this movie, I see this has become one of Tarantino's more divisive films in a long time.  Many are hailing it a masterpiece, while just as many claim it is overly violent and cruel.  I think I fall somewhere closer to the first category, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's one of his best.  It's a taut, well-executed mystery that takes a while before it springs its true nature on you.  Once it did, I was absolutely hooked.

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