The Hateful Eight

Review By: John Delia

The much anticipated release of another Quentin Tarantino movie opens this weekend. The Hateful Eight features all the title suggests and more.  Packed with twists and turns the movie builds to a rip roaring finale.  The cast will blow your mind with stellar performances by Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh to single out a few.  And the story, it’s so decadent that action lovers will be going back to see it again. A western it’s not, just a rip snorting drama taking place in a past when horseback and stagecoaches were the only transportation. Trust me here, if you like Hitchcock thrillers and screen violence doesn’t make you ill, you’ll walk away talking about the film for months or at least until you see the movie Revenant.

Its mountainous Wyoming with the snow covering every inch of the road. As a stagecoach approaches, Major Marquis Warren (Jackson), a black hearted ex-Union Civil War soldier and a vicious bounty hunter, is stranded in the wilderness blocking the road alongside the corpses he intends to cash-in.  Forcing the coach to stop, he approaches finding bounty hunter John “Hangman” Ruth (Russell) and his prisoner the ruthless Daisy Domergue (Leigh) being transported to be hung in Red Rock.  After picking him up, they come across Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins) who is a known killer that claims he’s the new Sheriff of Red Rock. When a blizzard takes the travelers by surprise, they are forced to hold up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a way house many miles from their destination.

The film plays out in the Haberdashery with several other stranded characters while the snow keeps getting deeper and the situation turns bitter.  So begins a story so sordid and wicked that even though you think you have it right, there’s always another side to consider.  Master storyteller and director Quentin Tarantino spools out his prize worthy film filled with emotion, fierce brutality, surprises and paradox.  Just like moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock, the master of the twist out of nowhere, Tarantino relishes in harassing his audience with amazement doing a perfect job of keeping us off balance.

His characters take the form of gunslingers, killers and gang member remixes from older westerns like High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, True Grit, Tombstone, and 3:10 to Yuma to name a few. That’s a good thing because the composites he delivers are true to form and blasts from the past.  I especially like the revival of Kurt Russell to the screen who played a similar character in the 2015 release of Bone Tomahawk.  He’s this scruffy canny bounty hunter that looks approachable on the outside, but a brutal killer inside who loves to watch his quarry swing from the gallows.

Then there’s Samuel L. Jackson as the notorious man hunter Marquis Warren who lets nothing stand in his way to bring his fugitives in “dead” for a payoff.  He’s so quick on the draw that his adversary is deceased before he can get his gun upright.  Very vicious, he trusts no one and uses his double revolvers at the hint of an attack.  I love this character dressed in black who reminds me a lot of Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Oh what a brilliant performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh as Daisy Domergue, the killer and patriarch of a notorious gang that wreaks havoc in the west. She’s a bitter and despicable woman who has no regard for human life, especially if they affect her dreadful family. Able to take a lot of punishment, she’s beaten, cracked on the head by a gun butt, pulled around on a chain, made to crawl like a dog and other inhuman things by her captor Hangman Ruth.  But, even with so much punishment, she never gives up trying to deliver it right back. If Leigh doesn’t get a nod for and Oscar in Best Supporting Actress category, I will be shocked.

This is one of those films where the whole cast deserves recognition as a group and individually. If there were an Oscar for Best Ensemble Cast they would certainly be in the running for it. Tarantino knows how to choose the stars to fit his characters in The Hateful Eight and has used them as mainstays in his films like Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Dern, Zoe Bell, James Parks and Walter Goggins in Django Unchained and Michael Madson and Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs.

Having had the opportunity to see the film in the 70mm “Roadshow” format in early December I found the presentation astounding.  Taking me back what seems like a decade ago, I realized how much I’ve missed not having this format for films like this year’s Jurassic Park, Furious 7, Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road.  But I also love having digital HD with its awesome digital effects in films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens and because of that I have no regrets.  The cost of 70mm is not as much to make the film as it is to distribute.  With theaters abandoning film platters for digital disc presentations that studios have moved to, the monstrous cost of distributing the 70mm, reinstalling projectors, special handling by a projectionist at the theater and available screen size, takes a toll on the filmmaker’s artistry. If you have a choice in your city to see The Hateful Eight in 70mm it’s definitely worth the extra dollars for the longer, colorful, huge and extremely exciting widescreen showing.

The Hateful Eight has been rated R by the MPAA for strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity.  A word of caution, the film envisions explicit viciousness that may be offensive or repulsive to viewers. The brutality involving women also deserves a note and has been addressed by Quentin Tarantino during an interview with Variety Magazine on-line dated December 26, 2015.

FINAL ANALYSIS: A very entertaining movie for those who like gutsy Tarantino thrillers. (A)