"The Hateful Eight" R
Snowfall seems to be a theme in 2015. With Everest, The Hateful Eight and the upcoming Revenant, among others, putting our grizzled frontiersmen in the snow seems the theme of later this last year. The eighth film my Quentinan Tarantino, who reinvented the gritty exploitation ballad, is a sort of follow up to his 2012 Django Unchained, which there had been a loose homage to the Italian western of a similar name.
This seems more of a nod to those frequent westerns where a bunch of bad guys are stuck in a room for hours during a snowstorm, and also the thriller film The Thing, which was not a western.
The first third of the movie, which in total weighs in at a good 2 hours and nearly 50 minutes, is set on a stagecoach in Wyoming with Kurt Russell and Jennifer Love Hewitt and Samuel Jackson chewing scenery.
The print we saw was the abridge wide released 70 mm one with the extra 20 minutes of preamble and some of the narration cut down. Really could could lose another hour, mainly a third of the coach ride, a third of the North and the post South Civil War speeches, and it would have been Oscar bait, clocking in at about 2 hours. It would have been just fine that way.
Quentin is also referencing modern play writes and authors copying him, but his style is a copy of other styles, a mix match of the great old classic westerns and the gritty gang land exploitation flicks of later years, so it's really lost on most except film buffs that it is what he's up to.
In this flick there isn't a hero among the bunch. A white and grizzled bounty hunter is taking his prize into Red Rock over a mountain pass when he meets a black bounty hunter hauling a cargo of dead bounty, frozen from the snow. They agree to ride in the grizzly dude's coach the rest of the way to a cabin to wait out the severe storm. It is odd the snow is ploughed all the way there. They come along a traveler, a younger man who is the son of a lawman gang leader who wishes to become a sheriff in Red Rock.
The cabin is a callback to several things and themes. Even though it packs the red apple cigarettes, a piano from a later era than 1869, and a missing crew, none of the four guests wonders what happened to that crew, or the owner, Minnie. They sometimes bring it up, but never seem to go beyond that.
In the cabin are four more bad guys, an old Civil War general, a faux British hangman, a desperate and lonely cowboy, and a literal Mexican bandit, and another hand.
The seven men and one woman continue to banter for hours, although some gags with a door that keeps opening are had, and there are some frontier justice lines that got a reaction. (The half of a filled theater meant that either people don't know about it, or know it's almost 3 hours, or don't care). The most awkward moment is one where the bounty hunter tricks the old man by implying his son was killed in a very gross and humiliating way, in order to get a reaction from him.
The movie has a lot of coincidences, too much really, as any insane band of outlaws knows if you're hold up in a room trying to pretend to be other folks, you kill all the witnesses immediately. They wait instead. This is not a normal reaction from black hat clad mercenaries!
The very violent pay off, which this review will not spoil, (as it just came out in wide), is worth the wait and the slick editing makes it to that point without the boredom you get from other similar films.
Ingorious Basterds, also nod to Italian stuff, had some really odd scenes that didn't seem like they needed to be there, as did Django Unchained, but really this one seemed to get that right, and even if stuff was long winded it worked. Django is more fun though.
Reservoir Dogs has a very similar theme actually.
The review could list Coen brothers movies or other similar works, but those are different.
It seems Quentin is trying for the love letter to exploitation and to westerns and the whole grind house nature again, and here it works.
Some critics seem bothered by two narration segments in the movie but they're all right because in the longer version they were after the intermission.
The editing could have been less like 'oh we need a twist' and just showed some exposition as to how the other bandits took the lodge. Also it seemed extremely coincidental, as the other bandits mistrusted the others, that they didn't figure it out long before the incidents escalate. Yeah they're insane. but still even insane people don't really do what they did in the end.
Even in Pulp Fiction, they knew that the villains were going to whack the guy in the car. Why wait? Just to make it more like a western with a nod to plays, scripts, and movies you've seen before. It's like in the old flicks where you know the obvious black and white nature villains and heroes, and Tarantino's flick here just has no heroes to root for.
Apparently the name of the villain lady is also a nod to someone copying Quentin's stuff, just to be meta.
Also his rants on the news were quoting the movie, but because most didn't see it yet, they had no idea his quotes were performance art and not what he actually thought.
If you get squeamish seeing simulated violence and unbridled beatings, demented insults and people driven mad in a cabin, do not see it. Then again, you know what you're getting seeing one of these.
It's not quite Oscar material, but it so could have been, with some slicker cuts and editing. If the five or six lectures therein were cut down and the acts moved to be more linear, it would have been an epic.
Review by Adam Brown
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