The Hateful Eight

THE HATEFUL EIGHT   **

Quentin Tarantino

2015

IDEA:  Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. Eight disparate individuals on the way to Red Rock are cooped up in a cabin stopover during a blizzard, suspicions growing as nobody seems to be quite who they say they are. 

BLURB:  Tarantino seems to be regressing. As his films have grown more grandiose in subject matter and theme, they have also become increasingly bloated and overwrought, not to mention juvenile and cruel. For a while, The Hateful Eight appears to be building toward something better as it carefully sets up its chamber piece scenario, corralling its diverse characters and generating tension from the distrust, animosity, and guarded motives they harbor. Ennio Morricone’s dread-inducing score pounds away with their every cautious forward movement, signaling that the film belongs as much to the horror genre as it does the western, and that a collective release of malice is surely yet to come. And come it does, resulting in queasily bountiful sprays of blood and bodies piling up. It’s sooner rather than later that the narrative and its intrigues fall apart, the reveal of the story’s true course as unimaginative and ultimately predictable as the bloodlust that seems more than ever to be the main goal. Tarantino has always enjoyed setting up overripe scenes and letting them unfurl before a burst of violent mayhem, but rarely has the aftermath felt so gruesome for gruesome’s sake, brutality so punishingly acrid that any trace of humanity has been all but extinguished from his sordid game. Although he positions his viper’s nest of racism and rancor as a microcosm of volatile post-Civil War America, and by extension of an enduringly fraught sociopolitical climate, any serious indictment of violence the movie may offer is quickly erased by how much glee the director derives from the cruelty he engineers. Cloaking his three-hour schlock under the pretense of contemporarily resonant historical drama isn’t only self-aggrandizing, but highly dubious.