Entertaining but vapid

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2016)

Does anyone really care that this is Quentin Tarantino's eighth movie, as if that is some sort of milestone that needs a respectful moment of silence? Will all of his next movies incorporate their ordinality into their respective titles? One can imagine The Rootin' Tootin' Niners or the Bellicose Eleventies coming to a theater near you. Actually, the movie should have just been called Everyone Sucks and Everyone Dies.
The Hateful Eight is entertaining, but it's non-70mm running time of 167 minutes is excessive, and just as good of a movie could have been condensed into two hours. The characters are delineated with just enough backstory to give them color, but the movie's biggest fault is that none of them are worth rooting for, and we're ultimately relieved at the end that none of them will go on to ruin anyone else's lives.
There's dialogue galore for you dialogue hounds. Tarantino writes good dialogue, and he wants you to know it. It's much akin to listening to the logorrhea of a Conor Oberst tune. People talk and talk and talk about talking' about stuff, and then something happens, usually accompanied by a volcanic blood burst, and of course we get a non-linear timeline, something Tarantino seems to fetishize.
A lot has been said about how gory and violent it is, but The Hateful Eight is nothing compared to the unwatchable Django Unchained, or any of the horrible torture porn movies like Hostel or Saw. The violence here is much more cartoonish, eliciting laughs at times, and some "no he didn'ts" at others. And yes there are n-bombs throughout the movie, I mean, because it's realistic and all.
The legendary Ennio Morricone provides a minimal soundtrack, and Tarantino ruins it by throwing in a White Stripes tune at an inopportune time. Tarantino is trying to recall better movies like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but fails to achieve such greatness here. Nevertheless, it's nice to know Morricone is still alive and kicking.
Much ado has been made of the 70mm version, but the vast majority of the movie is shot in a one-room wooden haberdashery. One must ask, what's the point? This isn't Barry Lyndon.
Then again, it is somewhat hard to discern the whole point of the movie.