The Hateful Eight (2015)

The Hateful Eight (R)

 "Reservoir CowDogs"

A pair of bounty hunters cross paths on the way to a snowed in Wyoming outpost, only to meet a slew of strangers holed up in a blizzard. One is hauling a live prisoner worth a $10,000 reward, and suspects everyone else of collusion, theft or chicanery.  Some may live or die, but none will escape unbloodied in Quentin Tarantino's 8th film, the red-soaked return to form The Hateful 8.

First, it must be said that Hateful Eight is less of a genre-ape than his previous few films, if anything TH8 is in the genre of his own first film Reservior Dogs (stick with your own genres QT), but by moving the narrative to the post-Civil War era has allowed him to toy with the idea that sometimes in our past even the good guys were pretty bad.  It turns into a slight whos-gonna-doit/who-dunnit  but since every one is a racist/misogynistic pig of varying likeability the answer could be anyone and we'd be happy.  The cast who plays these 8 are as much a who's who of past QT films as it's own plot points, and the story is framed like a stage-play, built from acts, using many of QT's previous trademarks that have come and gone through the years (the chapter marks from Kill Bill, the blood and crime drama of Res Dogs, the western-as-a-setting-to-provides-discussion-of-modern-race-relations of Django, the time distortion from most his films, the sudden out of place narrator and hidden-just-beyond-sight danger of Inglorious Basterds, and of course the director's cameo (though admittedly one of his least obtrusive)).  All of these make H8 more of a classic QT film (unlike Django Unchained, which we may have been too-hard on but we hold QT to a higher level and expect something beyond just a genre-rehash for modern wish fulfillment).  Hateful Eight is bolder than anything he's done in awhile, with a full commitment to his play-like setting with a large cast of regulars to mix it up in his bloody evil sandbox.

And those Hateful Eight are Kurt Russell (Death Proof) as John "Hangman" Ruth, brutally leading his prisoner Daisy Domergue (an almost unrecognizable Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the noose, the irreplaceable Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) as his fellow bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren who must justify his own existence constantly due to the color of his skin, Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern (both from Django) as Southern Rebels still nursing their loss in the War of Oppression, and Tim Roth and Michael Madsen (both from Resevoir Dogs) dressed up as two dangerous dandies out of place on the Western frontier.  There are other new faces and old, but they are all wrapped singularly into the fate of Daisy and her appointment with the hangman and those who would stand in the way.  Madsen's bizarre toughguy routine is blunted by his equally bizarre Will Rogers wardrobe (sticking out like a saddle sore thumb).  Yet Jennifer's deliciously evil spitting crone has some viewers screaming "anti-woman" for the violence she is subjected to and lack of white-knighting onscreen.  However, what QT is going for, and has successfully captured, is the harsh world of crime and punishment on the outlying segments of civilized society, a place where a gun and a fist are daily occurrences, where death is just outside your door if you aren't huddled by a fire and keep your horses fed, a world with a deadly lack of information and shifting trusts, of self reliance and uneasy pacts, the non-idealized old west where lynching and Injun wars and getting shot in the back were the realities, and women really were second class citizens trying to make a life amongst these brutes.  You can hate the player a bit, but you should really be hating the game more, and QT is shining the light on our forefathers.

Now it ain't all comin' up roses.  The movie is lengthy, and although it pays off in spades for it's long run it is also very wordy (luckily no "in the middle of everything Superman speeches" here however).  In that weighty runtime there aren't enough amazing moments to quite sustain; no Jew Hunter at the table, no ear severance dance, no showdown at House of Blue Leaves, no Bags on Heads, no high octane car crash leg ejection.  There is however enough tension and blood to maintain entertainment.  And with a delightfully bombastic score by Spaghetti Western master-composer Ennio Morricone (with some leftover bits from his score from Carpenter's The Thing), it marks the first film Tarantino has used an original score and it comes off perfectly (he still sneaks in some choice cuts from modern sources).  The cast at large does a terrific job (love ya Bob!), with Roth and Leigh and Russell and Goggins in particular enjoying their dialogue time on screen as much as we enjoy witnessing it.

So what is the point of all this, the 70mm wide angles, the straight foray into the American west of an admitted genre-muckraker, the encapsulating music, the buckets and buckets of gore, the fur coats and facial hair, the disparity of North vs South, Black vs White, Man vs Woman, Everyone vs Mexican?  Why Channing Tatum, why a Roadshow release, why yet another good excuse for QT to use the N-Word?  For the best reasons of all.  To tell a story that you can feel and see and hear and think about, and that is why Quentin wrote it and the actors enjoyed playing it and why it can be watched by us.  All 8+ characters are to be reviled and cheered as they suffer loudly, it is shades of grey for who justly lives and dies and ultimately who is the least hateful and who triumphs despite being hateful themselves.  It is almost a polar opposite of this year's other big (biggest ever) release, Disney's Star Wars The Force Awakens.  TH8 is Non-PC, non-regurgitated, non-self referencing, non-market tested consumer approved popart, and it was all made on non-digital cellulose film for and by cinephiles.  This is cinema as high-art succumbing to it's basest desires, the spoken word from the typed page, the cold puffs of breath from a boiling actor lost in their role, the mountain vistas splashed with golden sunlight and the grungy floorboards soaked in crimson lifeblood.

See y'all down the trail.

8 Well-Loved Lincoln Letters and Pots of Coffee out of 10 (GREAT)