I’m not much of a Quentin Tarantino fanboy, because I’m not generally a fan of any filmmaker who keeps making the same movie, with little variation. I have this problem with Wes Anderson. Some people just love their quirks, and love returning to that same formula again and again. I don’t. After a few such films, I begin to crave something new.
That said, Tarantino films tend to rank reasonably highly for me. They are vibrant and unusual, even if certain aspects grow predictable over time. They defy convention and formulas, except that now they all adhere to the same Tarantino formula — and is that really any different or better, when you still see what’s coming from a mile away? The dialogue crackles, while there is almost always a conceptual problem in the storytelling, such as, why are the Inglourious Basterds all but expendable from the story of Inglorious Basterds? His movies seem to set out to do one thing, and then they get distracted with another character or storyline, and that becomes what the movie is about. Usually, it’s still a fun diversion. But isn’t it about time Quentin Tarantino tried something different?
Some would argue that The Hateful Eight is that something different, but it is not. It has bits and pieces of every other Tarantino movie. It is a Frankenstein’s monster.
Much of the cast is obviously returning from other Tarantino joints — Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and Django Unchained, Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell from Death Proof, Michael Madsen from Kill Bill, Tim Roth from Reservoir Dogs (who you’d practically swear was Christophe Waltz from Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained). That’s fine — there are also some new faces in Tarantinoland, like Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, and most notably, Jennifer Jason Leigh. The look and setting are most recognizable from Tarantino’s last film, Django Unchained. This one takes place a handful of years after the Civil War and is still very much dealing with white men versus black men. This territory feels slightly old hat for Tarantino, not only because of Django, but also because he basically always likes calling attention to race, whether it’s relevant or not. The dreaded “N” word runs rampant here, but feels organic to the characters who spout it. It didn’t particularly bother me in the context of Reconstruction-era Hateful Eight, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who is growing tired of it.
Tarantino has done a number of variations on the Western already, which is why Hateful Eight mostly feels like a hodgepodge of Kill Bill and Django Unchained, with the modest scale of Reservoir Dogs thrown in for no good reason. A majority of the film takes place in a very contained interior location, and the rest largely takes place in the confines of a stagecoach. It would have been admirable that Tarantino was going for such a small-scale story — if he’d had the balls to stick to it.
But midway through The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino does what Quentin Tarantino has always done before. He gives in to the storytelling crutches that essentially redefined cinema in 1994 with the release of Pulp Fiction, and have been growing steadily staler ever since. He throws in a long chapter that’s out of chronological order, he inserts himself into the movie, and he gets cute — and, in doing so, wholly ruins the suspense he’s so painstakingly built up in the first act of this decidedly two-act movie.
Tarantino’s excesses are the reason that many people love Tarantino movies. It doesn’t make much fiscal sense to do a “bottle episode”-style movie set in one location, and then shoot and distribute it in extravagantly costly 70mm. But whatever! It’s Tarantino! I can get over this, and could maybe even love it in a movie that had better follow-through.
About midway through The Hateful Eight, I was impressed. I knew there was gruesome violence coming, but there hadn’t been any gruesome violence yet. The film is drawn out and talky, but in a way that felt true to its characters, with less showboating than you often get from a Tarantino script. There was even some subtlety — not a lot, but a little. For a moment there, I wondered if maybe we were going to get through an entire Tarantino movie without a major rewind sequence.
Nope! It’s here, and so is everything else. It certainly feels like Quentin Tarantino originally intended to do something different with this movie. A “locked room” mystery (in this case, technically, a “nailed shut because there’s a blizzard outside” mystery). A film that insinuates more than it shows. A story that leaves room for ambiguity, that lets the audience use their imagination to fill in the gaps. A contained number of cast members. (Eight, perhaps?) A movie that unfolds in straightforward fashion, all linear-like, in what feels a lot like real time.
Somewhere in the sprawling three-hour extravaganza that is The Hateful Eight is a nice, tight two-hour movie that could have been sublime. It would still be very Tarantino, because there’s blood everywhere in that last hour. Multiple heads explode. And up until then, there’s plenty of idle chatter. Of course, nobody these days goes to a Tarantino movie expecting “nice,” “tight,” or “two hours.” So who am I kidding? The problem is that it seems like Tarantino set out to make that movie here, or else why bother with the single location? The Hateful Eight has been compared to a stage play, which it almost is, except stage plays don’t have flashbacks that suddenly introduce a whole cast of disposable new characters. (As opposed to disposable old characters. In Tarantino movies, all characters are ultimately disposable.) Many won’t agree with me on this, but I’ll say it anyway: that flashback sequence ruins everything this movie is going for, in one fell swoop.
Tarantino doesn’t trust his audience to put the pieces together. He loves his own imagination so much that he won’t allow anything to be left up to ours. If we hear tell that there’s been a brutal bloodbath earlier, you can sure as hell bet we’re going to see every single bullet wound from that shootout, even if it adds nothing to the forward momentum of the story.
The second act of The Hateful Eight begins with an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, the answer to which is painfully obvious. The entire movie doesn’t hinge on that, but Tarantino stages the big reveal like it is a big reveal, and it is certainly not. He also makes the bizarre choice to interrupt a certain point in the movie with his own voiceover narration, which is the equivalent of Steven Spielberg’s booming voice cutting into a scene in Jaws in order to say: “Hey, guys, there’s a shark coming. Big, scary shark coming… right… about… now.” And then there’s a shark. Jaws famously works as well as it does because the mechanical shark malfunctioned, forcing Spielberg to insinuate much of the suspense. What’s left to the imagination is nearly always more powerful than what we see, but Tarantino disagrees. In The Hateful Eight, we see absolutely everything.
And we’ve seen it. Every character in The Hateful Eight will remind you of at least one character from a previous Tarantino movie. Every moment recalls a scene he’s staged before. A lot of moviegoers will be perfectly content to do it all over again. Eight times around, it’s still as fun as the first. I wouldn’t mind so much if this film weren’t set up as something different. If this story wasn’t just begging to be as intimate and contained as its setup would suggest. Would a Tarantino movie stripped of the director’s most irksome excesses still be a Tarantino movie? I think it would. Did Tarantino not trust himself, or not trust his fans? Did he try and write a simpler, more straightforward film, and then panic? Can he really just not help but throw in a whole unnecessary flashback sequence that bloats his film far past a sensible running time?
I was never bored during The Hateful Eight. There are characters and themes here I really enjoyed, and a lot of moments to savor — particularly in the superior first half. (I may very well be in the minority, preferring the staid first half to the explosive second.) There’s plenty of juicy discussion to dive into involving race and gender, and specific plot points that are worth dissecting, both bad and good. But then again, all of this potential is swallowed by a couple of severe miscalculations on Tarantino’s part — in my eyes, some of the most egregious errors made by any filmmaker this year.
I don’t mind a nearly three hour film per se, except that this film would be infinitely better if it weren’t. If Tarantino wants to go crazy with chronology and too many characters, godspeed! He’s done it before, and will undoubtedly do so again. But if he wants to make a contained Ten Little Indians murder mystery that feels like theater, I wish he’d just do it — as economically as such a thing should be. The Hateful Eight is like a great little chamber piece that’s been put on the rack and tortured by Tarantino until it barely resembles what it used to be.
It is my least favorite film by Quentin Tarantino.
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