The Hateful Eight - Classic Tarantino

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2016)

First, let me start off by saying that Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino are my two favorite living directors. While I respect Nolan more as a serious artist, I have to say Tarantino has the knack for producing some of the most entertaining movies in his short career as a major director. While Nolan's Inception, Interstellar and Memento are some of the best thought provoking films I have seen as of late, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction was more entertaining than any of them (on a MUCH smaller budget). And therein lies my dilemma: Pulp Fiction is the "high water mark" that I tend to compare all of his films to, and so far, he seems to always come closeÂ…but a little short of that marker. That being said, The Hateful Eight is one of his closest.
If you are a fan of Quentin's snappy repartee between characters that is often a hallmark of his films (you'd better be) then you are going to love the first hour and a half of this movieÂ…if you aren't, then maybe not so muchÂ…it IS a bit drawn out, yet essential to setting up the back-story of his characters. This is one instance that I wish he had been a little (okay a lot) more concise. He could have easily left 30 to 45 minutes of this back and forth between characters on the editing floor with little harm to the film. An hour into this 3-hour plus movie I was beginning to wonder whether or not I had made a mistake by coming to see it before reading its reviews. I had not. The movie DOES pay off in the end but be warned; many viewers may find it a slow boil. Also be warned that the last hour of this film is extraordinarily graphic, both in violence and sexual content, even for a Tarantino film, so you'd better have the stomach for it.
It's hard to say more about the story without giving away some of the plot twists. It is a western that evolves into a old fashioned dinner table murder mystery, then ultimately a story of ugly retributionÂ… there are no saints here (far from it) but perhaps a little redemption at the very end. It has all of the nihilism, gore and non-linear time line facets common to Tarantino's other movies as well as well cast familiar veterans of his previous films. Additionally, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walter Goggins, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell and Channing Tatum all give exceptional performances that are all but eclipsed by that of Samuel Jackson who once again demonstrates why he is a Tarantino regular and one of the most prolific and sought after actors in Hollywood today. Jennifer Leigh deserves accolades for convincingly portraying a character bearing no resemblance to anything in her repertoire. She may even get an Oscar nomination for it. She deserves it. Very entertaining: 8 (out of 10) stars.