The Hateful Eight is Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 Western mystery, 188 minutes long, about eight dubious strangers who take refuge from a blizzard in a stagecoach stopover a decade after the Civil War. Tarantino conceived it as a novel and a sequel to Django Unchained before making it a standalone film, and it plays like a stage play with a body count. It is talky, mean and beautifully shot, and it is the film where his indulgences and his gifts are hardest to separate.
Trailer, via Roadshow Films.
The Eight
Samuel L. Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a bounty hunter with a letter from Lincoln. Kurt Russell plays John “The Hangman” Ruth, transporting Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue to be hanged. Walton Goggins plays Chris Mannix, who says he is the new sheriff. Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern are the men already inside Minnie’s Haberdashery when the storm blows the rest in. Nobody is who they say they are, and the film is the slow work of finding out who is lying about what.
The Performances
Jackson is the film’s engine, and his long monologue in the first half is Tarantino’s writing at its most theatrical and Jackson’s acting at its most controlled. Leigh, who earned the film’s most attention, plays Daisy as a woman who takes every blow and gives back a grin, and it is a genuinely unsettling performance. Goggins is the surprise, a comic performance that turns into something else by the end. Russell and Dern do exactly what they were cast to do.
The Room
Tarantino shot the film in 70mm, and the irony that a format built for landscapes spends most of its runtime inside one room is deliberate. The width of the frame lets the camera hold all eight faces at once, and the film’s mystery is played out in glances at the edges. When the film does go outside, into the snow, it is as beautiful as anything he has made.
The Violence
When it comes, it comes all at once, and it is as graphic as the director has ever been. The second half of the film is a chamber piece turning into a massacre, and whether that turn is earned or merely enjoyed is the argument the film has been having with its audience since it opened.
Where It Falls Short
It is too long. The first act repeats its introductions, the middle stalls, and the film’s structure, with a narrated flashback that rewinds the story, is a trick the runtime cannot afford. The cruelty toward Daisy is relentless in a way that stops being about character and starts being about the film’s appetite. And the mystery, when solved, is smaller than the buildup implies.
The Verdict
The Hateful Eight is a gorgeous, overlong, self-satisfied film with three or four great performances and a script that mistakes duration for depth. Its best hour is as good as its director gets. Its worst hour is his worst too.
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