Rent The Hateful Eight (2015)

Takes time to Develop, but just like a Fine Wine, the Wait is Worth the While! - The Hateful Eight review by CS

This is an incredibly slow film which takes an extremely long time to develop the plot, almost one and a half hours before you start o see any real action. However the last half an hour really explodes with classic Tarantino action, a little bloodthirsty, but well worth the wait! Because this takes such a long time to develop, I can see a lot of people switching off in the first half an hour and I even had to watch this in three instalments because it was so slow! This is more of a play than a movie and I can see it being re-enacted on the stage, as it really does look like a stage play which has been made into a movie! One of the other reviewers suggests that this is like an Agatha Christie who-dun-it and they are right, a bit like watching a Poirot movie set in the American Wild West! Personally I found the plot quite obvious and there are a few flashbacks to explain it to those who don't quite get it first time around, whilst I guessed what was happening early on, this still didn't spoil the fun, as just like an Agatha Christie novel, you get to see if you guessed rightly or wrongly! So it does have an element of fun about it, it just takes a long time to develop, but in the end, I found the wait worth the while!

Meh. - The Hateful Eight review by AW

I didn't hate it, but I was distinctly underwhelmed. If you're in the mood for a Western retread of Reservoir Dogs, you'll probably enjoy it, but I found it all fairly predictable apart from one specific sequence. And even that involved someone getting shot, so hardly breaking new ground here.

Good second half - The Hateful Eight review by PC

This is really a cross between an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sprawling western, unfortunately it takes a good hour and a half to get there. Once it gets going its a good old fashioned violent western Tarantino style, the acting is great but why do all films have to be over 2 hours these days.

Slow pace but great film - The Hateful Eight review by CP Customer

I really enjoyed this , yes it's slow moving but the story and suspense is good all through the film. You don't always need explosions or a fast moving plot to have a great film. You really never know who is good or bad in this story or what's going to happen next. Good twists all the way through to the end.

But mean bastards you have to hang - The Hateful Eight review by SQ

Loved this film far more than i thought i would, very funny, very violent, a superb western survival horror.

Tolerable - The Hateful Eight review by CM

A few minutes in, I realized that it was a Tarantino, & feared more like Django Unchained, but it had the superb Jennifer Jason Leigh & Bruce Dern, so we stuck with it. It lost a lot when Dern left the action, & went down a gear, but we saw it through. If this rating system were more nuanced, I'd give two & a half stars.

Well made, just too long - The Hateful Eight review by RT

Version I saw: Sony Movie Channel stream

Actors: 6/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 8/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

Tarantino can be great at his best, btu I have no patience for him at his worst, so I was not sure what to expect from this film.

A large part of what I noticed and liked was not actually directly attributable to QT. The legendary Ennio Morricone's Gothic-tinged score. Robert Richardson's excellent cinematography - both in sumptuous landscape photography during the external scenes and he unusual but effective use of extremely wide angle shots in the interior sections. The superb environment that is the Millie's Haberdashery set, dressed to the nines and oozing period atmosphere, into which a large part of the film's narrative comfortably nestles.

Quentin can certainly take direct credit for the script, which bears his distinctive fingerprints all over it. The sharp repartee is there in spades, but what impressed me is how much exposition it concealed. Often the baiting and backbiting between the strangers gathered at this isolated waystation allowed one of them to take up the task of explaining a plot detail for us without it seeming like an infodump.

It helps that many of the cast are Tarantino regulars, and veteran actors to boot. They know exactly where they stand with him, and have the experience to work out the kind of territory into which they have been placed. So, it is no slight on them to say that a lot of them are over-acting their pants off. This is just that kind of movie, and smart performers play up to it. They probably had a lot of fun, in fact. There is a knowing archness to the production, a little like a Wes Anderson film. It is also quite stagey, but in a good way - I admire the craft it takes to bring a drama to life using a very limited number of locations and angles.

The length of the film is a problem, though. At 2 hours and 48 minutes, it is not quite epic, but I still found that it tried my stamina. The problem is not that it contains unnecessary scenes; I cannot honestly say that I spotted any scene that did not need to be there. Instead, I would say that many - perhaps even most - scenes went on too long. He's done it before with Death Proof, although in that case he had the excuse that it was padded out from the intended segment of the larger Grindhouse project. Here, I cannot see that he had any such prior circumstances to blame. It just seems like self-indulgence, a weakness to which he has always been vulnerable.

The irony is that QT very vocally admires, imitates and celebrates a range of sub-genres and categories whose characteristics are formed by their limitations, either in terms of budget or outside interference by studios or censors. Given the kind of creative freedom he has, they would never be stooping to some of the measures in which he appears to revel.

The Hateful Eight is an enjoyable film, well-made and successfully delivered, and nothing else matters anywhere near as much as that. I think better, more disciplined editing could have resulted in a shorter, tighter, better version, but then again that was never going to happen, because it's Tarantino. That's not what he does. This is what he does.

For my full review, see my independent film weblog on Blogspot, Cinema Inferno.