Not the gr8-est, but I didn't h8 it

Rating: 6/10 (17 February 2016)

Of all the QT films I have seen I would have to rate (or should that be r8?) the Hateful Eight as the least effectual. It seems that Tarantino operates at the height of his game when he is making his OWN movies and not paying homage to an obsolete genre with a pastiche (read fake) style.
Set in a post-civil war Wyoming the movie takes its time setting up the characters with a long prologue before finally arriving at the stagecoach outpost where our awful octet growl and point guns at each other for two hours. Tarantino never really seems to know what kind of movie he is making here, awkwardly fusing a western with a whodunnit, which would be fine under any other circumstances but he does it in such a cartoonish and immature way.
Even with a 3-hour running time (depending on which version you're watching) there's not enough breathing room for these characters to all have equal development. Tim Roth can only bring his Oswaldo Mowbray to life with a silly accent, while Michael Madness as Joe Gage has nothing to do but squint and channel his inner Nick Nolte. Kurt Russell and Sam Jackson work great together though, while Jennifer Jason Leigh makes for a truly vile lady villain.
Tarantino's super-duper indulgent 2.76:1 photography is almost entirely ineffectual for what is, essentially, a single-set stage play. The establishing shots are nice and all, but there's nothing here that could not be achieved with regular anamorphic Panavision. I saw a 70mm version of the movie and felt that the much wider screen only created problems. Pulling off a close-up in 2.35:1 is already hard to do, but here a close-up is nothing more than a very centered headshot with excessive picture information at the sides. This type of movie is completely unsuitable for the Super Panavision 70 format.
I was excited to hear Ennio Morricone's score, especially since Tarantino has been reluctant to have (original) musical scores until this point, but it's basically just one melody played over and over, with the exception of one track I am sure was pulled from the score to The Thing. It was a track I always felt was John Barry-esque and easily identifiable. Hiring Morricone to do the score proves that Tarantino thinks he's making a 1960s spaghetti western when really he's just pretending to, a trait that doomed those utterly moronic Grindhouse movies a few years ago.
I'm not really sure what the point of this movie was. I walked out of this mildly entertained with a large crowd of people who felt about the same. And why does Channing Tatum have to be in EV-ER-Y-THING? I so sick, sick, SICK to death of seeing him in movies. There is such a thing as overexposure, you know!