Rent The Hateful Eight (2015)

Stagey and tedious - The Hateful Eight review by Alphaville

Remember the long conversational scene at the start Inglorious Basterds? Tarantino has turned it into a 160min film. It feels longer. It begins slow, it continues slow, there’s a half-hour gory section, it fizzles out.

The endless chat about the Civil War and racism does little to advance character or plot. It’s self-indulgent, ponderous and tedious. Because it’s Tarantino, you may sit through it waiting for something to happen. You’ll wait a long time. This is a film made by someone in love with the sound of his own dialogue and little else. If he was a student scriptwriter he’d fail the course.

The opening snowscapes augur well but we’re soon inside a stagecoach, then a staging post, for the rest of the film. It’s like an Agatha Christie locked-room whodunit with stereotypical characters, none of whom we care about. Why film in Super Panavision 70 when it’s no more than a filmed play that nearly all takes place in confined spaces?

Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson etc, go through their usual paces. Ennio Morricone’s musical choices are ridiculous (White Stripes?!). Tarantino’s camera direction is banal. He needs someone to tell him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.