The Hateful Eight

(Movie Review)

***Spoiler Warning***
This is one of those movies in which knowing the plot twists ahead of time will completely ruin the movie for you.  Even minor spoilers should ideally be avoided.  So if you haven't seen this film yet, don't read the review.

The Review
I wish I had some new commentary to offer, but most of what I have to say about this film are the same things I said before in my previous reviews of Quentin Tarantino movies.
This wasn't intentional--I didn't set out to copy myself--but after the movie finished, I made a list of everything that struck me and it was largely the same things I had said before about other Tarantino movies.

So here goes:
Quentin Tarantino is an amoral story-teller in just about every sense.  Not only does he like to tell stories in which the good guys don't always win, but he likes to tell stories in which there are no clear good-guys.
In this aspect he is not necessarily unique.  Granted, it's obviously a departure from the modern Hollywood storytelling formula, but to be fair, unhappy violent endings have a long tradition in world literature.  (the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's tragedies, Japanese literature).  But what separates Tarantino from the Greek tragedies is that in the Greek tragedies, the audience was supposed to learn a lesson.
In Tarantino movies, however, there's no larger message he's trying to communicate.  It's a violent story about amoral people with a violent ending, and the audience is left with nothing to take away.

...Nothing to take away, that is, except a sense of awe at how well the story is told.  The art of the story-telling itself is the sole point.

Tarantino's basic technique has remained the same over the years, even though he's pushed it further and further with each movie.
The audience knows that he's got a sadistic sense of violence in him.  So you know sooner or later, the hammer's going to drop down, and people are going to get killed in very violent ways.
And you know he's got an amoral sense of storytelling, so there's no guarantee that the sympathetic characters are going to live, and the hateful ones are going to die.  Anybody could be violently killed at any moment.
And Tarantino knows that we know this.  So he's able to exploit this tension by making the build up longer and longer and longer.
He's been pushing this more and more with each movie.  In Inglorious Basterds, he was able to keep the tension going for about 20 minutes before the shooting finally started.
In The Hateful Eight, he milks that tension all the way up to 90 minutes.

And for my money, he pulls it off.  I mean, wow, does he pull it off.  Even though it was 90 minutes of slow build up, I was on the edge of my seat for the whole time.
Add to that Tarantino's wonderful ear for dialogue.
Add to that the great actors that Tarantino always recruits, and the wonderful performances he always gets out of them.
Add to that some interesting visual tricks with camera angles.

The word "genius" get over-used a lot these days (and I'm guilty of over-using it myself) but I'm convinced Tarantino is a true genius.  His movies are going to be studied in film schools for decades to come.

Which makes it so puzzling that a man possessed with such genius is so obsessed with creating low-art.

I don't want to say that the violence is pointless in a Tarantino film, because the threat of eventual violence is what underlies the whole tension of the narrative.
But...but you do get a sense that he takes a little bit too much sadistic pleasure in this violence.  And this is something that's bothered me in all his movies, but it's on full display here as well--the director seems to take a little bit too much pleasure in using Jennifer Jason Leigh's character as a human punching bag, or in describing the sadistic torture of General Sandy Smith's son, or in showing Samuel L. Jackson in pain after having his testicles blown off, or showing Six-Horse Judy gasping for breath as she's bleeding to death on the ground.
Don't get me wrong, I like an action movie as much as the next guy, but the sadism in Tarantino's violence has always troubled me.

....And yet, without the threat of that sadistic violence hanging over the narrative, you wouldn't have any tension in the narrative.  It's precisely because you know that Tarantino's crazy enough to do all this stuff that you get so tense as you watch the movie.  It's what makes his work so fascinating, and also so problematic.

But if someone were to ask me: forget all the moralizing--the real question is: were you entertained?

Then I would have to admit that, yes, I was.  Thoroughly.

Final Analysis and Rating
The first half of the film was pure genius--the way the tension slowly built, the way the characters slowly assembled, the way the plot was slowly began to form, the way we got slow hints that something wasn't quite right at the inn.  The dialogue was brilliant, the actors were brilliants--I was thinking I might be giving this movie a full 10 out of 10 stars.

But then once the tension broke into violence, the violent ending wasn't nearly as satisfying as the tense build up.  And I'm going to knock a couple stars off for that.

That, plus when it was revealed that another character had been hiding in the basement, this seemed to me to be cheating.  The set-up seemed to promise a story in which 8 men were locked in a cabin, and would have to work everything out themselves.  To introduce another character out of nowhere, and to have him come out like a deus ex machina and upset the balance of power, broke the rules of the game.

Final score: 8 out of 10 stars.

Links:
A lot of people a lot more intelligent than me have written about Tarantino's contradictions, so I'll borrow from a couple of them.

I think Vince Mancini at Uproxx.com sums up the nature of Tarantino's work very well:

The basic pattern of The Hateful Eight is this: Tarantino displays a mastery of classic storytelling and brilliant suspense that would make him the darling of even the stodgiest elitist film critic, and then, just when they’re ready to elect him president of the snoot academy, he hits them with an exploding dick or some shitbomb of schlocky gore that ruins countless cravats. He never lets you forget that while he can do high art as well as anyone, low art is his first love, that no matter how much he evolves, he’ll always be a vulgarian.

The AVclub has an interesting review which sees political themes in The Hateful Eight.  I think they may be being a bit too generous (I saw the movie as mostly just violence for the sake of violence), but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Also I found this discussion here to be an intelligent dissection of both the movie's strengths and weaknesses.



 For my other reviews of Tarantino movies, see: Django Unchained, Inglorious Basterds, Kill Bill, Kill Bill Further Thoughts,  Kill Bill 2, and True Romance.

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