Good but not great

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2017)

All of Quentin Tarantino movies are fun to watch, and I can always feel his appreciation of filmmaking as a craft as well as his joy in film as pure entertainment. The setup to 'Hateful Eight' is fantastic, with beautiful outdoor shots in snow country, and an interesting concept, characters being added one by one as a bounty hunter stops to pick up those imperiled by an oncoming blizzard. Tarentino assembles a fine cast with Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh among others, and Bruce Dern turns in a great performance. There are some deep moments amidst the violence, Jackson saying in one scene that "The only time black folks are safe, is when white folks is disarmed", and Tim Roth's character expressing the thin line justice walks in a speech ending with the line "For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice" in another. I liked how the stories behind each of the characters are gradually revealed, and how the story behind what happened earlier in the haberdashery that everyone is holed up in is told in a flashback chapter. In other words, there's a lot to like here. And yet. And yet. How the story plays out was somehow not completely satisfying, maybe because I felt like it lost focus, and fell back on extreme gore and graphic moments to try to carry the day. I was also not a huge fan of the ending. It's a good film for sure, but not great, or Tarantino's best.