Review of The Hateful Eight (2015) by Dirkdeagler — 06 Jan 2016

Mixed feelings on this one.

In general, I was a fan of most of the cast before coming to the theatre, and I really liked the performances from Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walter Goggins, and Bruce Dern. Jackson, Russell, and Leigh really seemed to inhabit the characters. The interplay between Jackson and Bruce Dern produced a really memorable scene. Russell and Leigh had good chemistry as a bounty hunter/outlaw handcuffed together.

Michael Madsen really stuck out in a bad way. His faux-cowboy accent was just terribly unconvincing and he came off as trying to be the same character from Reservoir Dogs with a lame outfit and accent. Also not sure what they were trying to do with the "Bob" character-- apparently an attempt to caricaturize representations of Mexicans in Westerns but it was just kinda incomprehensible.

The film's structure was jarring. The opening really took it's time setting the stage and introducing the principal characters, and the initial scenes in Minnie's Haberdashery were fairly slow-paced. I was expecting a slow build through the first half of the film, and then an increasing pace as the volatile dynamics between the characters played out. I actually enjoyed the slow build-up through the first half of the movie, so the transition to Tarantino's voice-over narration to start Chapter 4 felt out-of-place and like an artificial device to speed up the plot development. The narration and the flashback chapter really robbed the "whodunnit" aspect of the film of its earlier promise owing to the slow buildup. I would have liked to see what this film would have been if the events played out a little more naturally, with the audience not having complete information.

Knowing this was a Tarantino film, I expected over-the-top violence walking into the theater. In some cases, the violence helped drive the theme that post-Civil War America really was a pretty nasty place. Tarantino more than made his point though, and at some point the violence almost crossed over into slapstick territory. The film's tone wasn't exactly solemn throughout, but the second half of the film seemed more devoted to humorous moments than to resolving the plot in a comprehensible way. The forced fellatio scene just felt out of place, and took away from an otherwise great scene.

I'm not a big enough Western enthusiast to understand all the homages Tarantino felt he needed to include to do a proper tribute to the genre. I left with the lingering feeling that Tarantino included certain homages or references at the expense of making a tighter film.