Let’s start with the snow, as it’s everywhere you look in The Hateful Eight: Sneaking in through floorboards and half-opened windows; clinging to fur-covered jackets and wide-brimmed hats; swirling around the characters like an unapologetic eavesdropper. It’s hard not be distracted by all this wintry build-up in Quentin Tarantino’s latest, opening today—partly because it looks so vividly ethereal, but mostly because, about a half-hour through the director’s blood-basted, fun-free, gorgeous bore of a movie, you realize all that snow got off easy. After all, it’ll hit the ground and dissolve in just a few seconds. We viewers, on the other hand, have at least another hour and a half to go.
Hateful finds Tarantino operating at the peak of powers—at least in terms of cultural cred. His last film, 2012’s Django Unchained, won him a screenwriting Oscar and made more than $400 million worldwide, making Tarantino not only a mushroom-cloud-laying-motherfucker, but a mushroom-cloud-laying-motherfucker with tenure. That may be why he was able to convince longtime backers/enablers Bob and Harvey Weinstein to release Hateful in wondrous-looking 70mm, and to allow for a special 187-minute “roadshow edition” that includes an opening overture (from wide-vista Italian composer Ennio Morricone) and a lengthy intermission.
As such, Hateful belongs to a rare and relatively nascent film genre, one that includes this month's other outlier spectacle—Star Wars: The Force Awakens—and which is simply known as The Kind of Movie They Don’t Make Anymore. And for that reason alone, it’s a must-see: How often do you get to watch one of the world’s most playful and genuinely movie-obsessed directors get to indulge his every on- and off-screen fantasy—from casting to scoring to film processing—with near-unlimited financial resources and seemingly no corporate intervention?
Yet seeing Tarantino’s vision to the end requires not only patience, but a willing suspension of disbelief that the guy who cajoled John Travolta into doing the Batusi and created Uma Thurman’s samurai-a-go-go could lose himself in a movie so flat and joyless. Set during a blinding blizzard in an unspecified year shortly after the Civil War, The Hateful Eight begins in the gray-white wilds of Wyoming, where a stagecoach carries three surly traveling companions: John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bellicose bounty hunter whose mustache pokes to the side like plushy walrus tusks; his prisoner, Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a snarling enigma whose weathered face and withering glances belie a hard-knock life; and Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a cool-headed fellow bounty-seeker who’s fresh from a stint as particularly dangerous Union solider.
Along the way, they pick up Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins), a rube-boy claiming to be the new sheriff of Red Rock, the town where Daisy will finally be hanged, and where John will collect his reward. With the exception of some spirited discussion about Warren’s most prized possession—a personal letter he claims to have received from Abraham Lincoln—the first half-hour or so of Eight consists of the four of them bantering, squabbling, and doling out endless amounts of back-in-the-day exposition. Some of this starched back-and-forth is no doubt intended as misdirection for what will come next, but Quentin-canon acolytes will be bummed to know this is his least quotable movie since Death Proof.
When the storm worsens, the group seeks refuge in Minnie's Haberdashery, an outpost-slash-restaurant-slash-watering hole, where they’re joined by a retired Confederacy bigwig (Bruce Dern); an overly chipper English hangman (Tim Roth); a stoic shop employee (Demián Bichir); and Michael Madsen (Michael Madsen). It’s at Minnie’s that Hateful Eight turns from a snowbound loath-warrior tale to a slow-percolating murder-mystery, and Tarantino’s decision to set the majority of the movie in a single open-spaced room—and to capture it with a film format better known for chariot races and car chases—is his most rewarding. The longer the characters stay in Minnie’s, the more it becomes at once spacious and stultifying, allowing the Eight enough room to huddle and conspire, but never enough distance to breathe easily. And the crispness of 70mm reveals micro-level details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed; it’s hard to think of a non-Nancy Myers movie that’s made deep-background frying pans look quite as alluring as they do here.
As for what actually transpires in that room once it begins to overcrowd…well, it would be unkind to reveal too much, even for a movie whose twists feel more like uninspired pivots. But suffice to say that the last two hours of The Hateful Eight—as alliances shift, and narrators become increasingly unreliable—find Tarantino executing a number of set-pieces that range from trying to genuinely tense (one especially brutal and nervy sequence conjures up the same dread as the German-tavern stand-off in 2009’s Inglourious Basterds). It helps that many of these scenes focus on Jackson and Leigh, who play polar-opposite baddies—she’s to-the-point nasty, he’s more into long-con cruelty—with chilling intuitiveness.
Yet even Hateful Eight’s sporadic satisfactions can’t make up for the fact that it plays like a Quentin Tarantino jukebox musical, incorporating all of his greatest hits: Gut-blasted gore; fuck-laden tough-guy banter; vengeful sexual assault; and, of course, the n-word, which flies around the room like piñata candy. It makes sense that many of these old habits feel tired by now: After all, they’ve pretty much been borderline-copyright-worthy elements of Tarantino’s oeuvre since 1992’s Reservoir Dogs.
But in Hateful, such reflexive tics are all he has to show—a true bummer, given what’s come before. In the first phase of his career, Tarantino expertly imposed his spastic pop-obsessions, VHS-bred genre-smarts, and juicy pulp afflictions onto a recognizably modern world, giving potentially stock characters like Vincent Vega or Jackie Brown a dimensionality that made them more than just gun-twirling quote machines. In later years, he turned revisionist-historian, anchoring his ever-so-gonzo storylines to actual events—the Nazi occupation of France, the slave trade in antebellum South—that kept them tethered him to the real world.
The Hateful Eight finds Tarantino clinging to no such steady firmament. There are grisly, squib-tastic deaths here—some of the grisliest non-horror flick demises you'll ever see—and yet they happen to characters that remain so alien and unformed, even by the fuck-you finale, you may as well be watching a special-effects reel. It's as though The Hateful Eight takes place not at Minnie’s, but within the Tarantinoverse of the director's head, a showroom full of first-draft jokes, easy cruelty, and not a speck of recognizable human life. This is Quentin Tarantino lost in his own world. Here’s hoping he comes in from the cold soon.
