Credit Quentin Tarantino with this: it was cool seeing a modern movie in 70mm with Overture and Intermission, especially when coupled with an original Ennio Morricone score. Too bad the actual film, The Hateful Eight (2015), is typically self-indulgent nonsense.Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), Union soldier-turned-bounty killer, joins a stagecoach with John Ruth (Kurt Russell), chained to murderess Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and Confederate renegade-turned-Sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). A blizzard strands them at a trading post with a pack of oddballs: effete Englishman Oswaldo (Tim Roth, subbing for Christoph Waltz), growling gunslinger Joe (Michael Madsen), aged Confederate General Smithers (Bruce Dern) and shifty Mexican Bob (Demian Bichir). Not everyone is whom they seem, with predictable consequences.
Despite its David Lean dimensions, The Hateful Eight is no epic. Cinematographer Robert Richardson fills the opening hour with some beautiful snow-scapes, but the film's mostly typical Tarantino: sprawling dialog scenes culminating in murder. Tarantino not only references other films (spoofing everything from The Great Silence to Death Wish 2) but his own, recycling dialog and an entire set piece from Inglourious Basterds. The juxtaposition of scope and form suggests latter-day Tarantino's problem: self-importance.
Perhaps he's read too many reviews twisting Basterds into a postmodern masterpiece, or Django Unchained as an insightful attack on slavery, but QT wants his blood-soaked B Movie collages to be taken seriously. His characters no longer debate Madonna lyrics or chat about cheeseburgers, but philosophize on the Confederate Lost Cause or the equity of frontier justice. The film even ends on a note of North-South reconciliation, albeit grislier than anything John Ford envisioned.
Paradoxically, the more ambitious Tarantino gets, the more puerile he becomes. Artist or not, he still loves shocking viewers with race baiting, political incorrectness and grindhouse gore. After an hour of grandiloquent stage-setting, Hateful Eight bursts into violence more absurd than offensive. Exploding heads, gay rape, even characters projective-vomiting blood don't register any more than the endless N-words. Still, the sound of viewers laughing at a hanged character's death spasms roused my inner Pauline Kael. What's wrong with some people?
Samuel L. Jackson, oddly enough, plays the straight man. He's subdued and calculating, especially compared to bellowing Kurt Russell and goofy Walton Goggins. Jennifer Jason Leigh is largely limited to demented scowls, relishing snowflakes on her bloody tongue. Old Tarantino hands Michael Madsen and Tim Roth get the thinnest roles; Bruce Dern's Confederate fossil is far more engaging. Channing Tatum has a brilliant cameo as a silky outlaw.
When Tarantino was simply the arbiter of post-modern cool, his self-indulgence worked. Pulp Fiction's sprawling, madcap irreverence plays as fresh now as it did twenty-two years ago. Jackie Brown was both homage to Blaxploitation flicks and well-crafted thriller. Since Kill Bill, his movies are simply overblown genre pastiches, garnished with self-importance. The Hateful Eight provides the culmination: a gallery of caricatures spitting profanity and bullets at each other, thinking itself art.
