Deathly bore in the snow

Rating: 1/10 (10 February 2017)

After Django Unchained and now, The Hateful Eight, I'm convinced Quentin Tarantino only makes Westerns so he can use the N-word with impunity and suggest it's "historical accuracy," rather than blind racism. Tarantino is now the Leni Riefenstahl of the KKK. H8 is a rancid stew of racism, misogyny, sexual violence, bad Southern accents and worse acting. Once upon a time, QT's strengths were his direction of actors and his dialogue. Both seem to have died snowblind in this Wyoming blizzard. Whether it's Kurt Russell's blustery ripoff of Jeff Bridge's Rooster Cogburn or Tim Roth's twittery Brit (what were you thinking, Tim?) the acting is universally dreadful. Jennifer Jason Leigh's Southern accent is the worst I've heard since Kevin Costner tried for N'Orleans and flopped. And even Walton Goggin's, who rose to fame as Appalachian white trash in Justified, inflates his accent to the over-ripe. The dialogue is mostly Russell bully-blustering the other actors or endless drippings of Southern fried N-droppings. (In one exchange between Bruce Dern and Goggins, it's tossed back and forth something like 7 times.) Tarantino somehow managed to fail the simple task of creating believable character names. They're either ludicrously unpronounceable (Daisy Domergue; Marquis Warren) or ostentatiously silly (Oswaldo Mobray). And QT has managed to take modern special effects (key to an action movie) to new lows of ineptitude. In the various shootings, the blood seems to wash in waves from the victims, from balloons over-inflated with dollar store red paint, then exploded with firecrackers. For most of his career, Tarantino seemed an unusually gifted, if emotionally arrested artist too easily drawn to the juvenile. Now the juvenile emotions seem to have taken complete hold and left him with an empty bag and no way forward. From the evidence of his last two or three movies, "no way forward" may be a good thing.