One of Tarantino's better movies

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2016)

I'm not a Quentin Tarantino fan. His movies are self indulgent, appallingly overlong and despite the fact that they're what everyone complains about- style over substance- everyone seems to love them. Reservoir Dogs is a great film, but Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, while good films in many ways, were bloated, overdone epics of nothingness. The Hateful Eight, which is a stage play style murder mystery set in a cabin in America shortly after the Civil War. 8 unlikable characters, including a bounty hunter and his prisoner, are there and soon things get tense and the blood starts flowing. This seems to be dividing audiences quite a bit. For me, this is actually better than Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. With the amazing 70mm cinematography is amazing, and Tarantino shows he's a very good director as well as a good writer. This is a pretty dark movie, and it has various thought provoking themes which work well. The claustrophobic setting and tense murder mystery narrative make this feel more focused and suspenseful, unlike some of his other films which just rambled on all over the place.
Acting is typically excellent, especially from Samuel L Jackson, Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and since this felt thematically deeper and far more tense than some of Tarantino's other films, I enjoyed this more. It was actually about something for once. I was interested in The Hateful Eight since it was mostly in one location and had a budget of $44 million. It looked more like Reservoir Dogs, so I thought I'd get on better with this one. I did, but I also thought Tarantino might restrain himself a bit here. Not so. This movie is nearly 3 hours long and before they get to the cabin, it's pretty desperate. It's as bloated and self indulgent as ever, although it uses its non linear storytelling well. At times ugly and often featuring rambling dialogue sequences which could be done in a few lines but instead go on and on, this struggles to maintain the energy of its best sequences. As for the violence? A bit exhausting and superfluous, but Tarantino knows how to do a shootout. A decent movie; outrageously overlong but it shows Tarantino being more arty and mature as a filmmaker and writer, so it should be relatively satisfying for most.
7/10