Tarantino's 'Thing'......

Rating: 9/10 (29 December 2015)

While travelling to the town of Red Rock in post-Civil War Wyoming, bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth, and his fugitive prisoner, encounter another bounty hunter, and a man who claims to be a sheriff.
Hoping to find shelter from an incoming blizzard, the group travels to a stagecoach stopover located on a mountain pass.
Greeted there by four strangers, the eight travellers soon learn that they may not make it to their destination........
Just of late, it's been a fashion that movies released between the months of November to March, with an eclectic cast, wonderful story, and a bravura marketing campaign (AKA Oscar bait), has to be nearing the three hour mark.
We've had The Wolf Of Wall Street, Django Unchained, The Revenant, and now, this.
But they never seem like they are that length, especially this one, because Tarantino must know that a film this length could potentially be a hard slog, so he puts his three acts into handy, bite-size chapters.
But unlike many a whodunit with which are of a certain length, The Hateful Eight unfortunately feels bloated for the first act only, and the usual Tarantino banter that is usually the heart, soul, and main selling point of his movies, just feels forced, but in the first act only.
The whole build up to the halfway house could have been trimmed by at least eighty percent, as the exposition between Jackson, Russell, Leigh, and Goggins, is like the energiser bunny, it just goes on and on, and on and on........
And it really doesn't tell you much about the characters, or their traits, it's just a case of them saying to each other 'hey, didn't you', 'your such and such' for a good hour.
But then when we reach the halfway house, and the halfway point of the movie, it goes absolutely bonkers, and what Taratino has given us, is a slow, a very slow build up to one of the most tense second and third acts that the man has ever created.
The film feels like a mix of Reservoir Dogs, and Carpenters 'The Thing', and this becomes all the more apparent when Morricone's own score from The Thing 'Bestiality' is used in the more tense scenes.
Again, The Thing similarities are all the more evident as the film progresses. The unbearable elements of the outside, the trust quickly dwindling from the group, the lining up against the wall, reminisces one of the blood test scene in The Thing, and the whole film has that claustrophobic element to it like Carpenters did.
Even Jackson hitching a ride on the carriage could reference the huskies travel to the station.
And then there's Kurt Russell.........
Tarantino does the narrative for the film, and although it comes across as a bit of a pretentious thing to do, it works because it kinds of smooths over plot points that couldn't really be explained on screen with actual narrative.
The cast, as you'd expect are all excellent. Jackson is a little bit pedestrian for a an hour or so, but again, I believe that this is Tarantino's intention to make the latter part of the film more tense, because the monologue Jackson gives to Dern about his son, rivals that of Jules' Ezekial 25:17 speech, and then he becomes the films focus point. The man is brilliant.
Russell too is excellent, and him and Jason Leigh bounce off each other and provide the humour. Roth does his best Waltz impression, You wonder why Dern is there at all, but again, thanks to the narrative, it all becomes clear as soon as the film becomes too bogged under by its own madness.
And then there's the violence. Unflinching, over the top and pretty psychedelic, it's s Ow motion harks at the Wild Bunch, but the blood veers toward total exploitation.
Top it off with cinematography to die for, and a sublime score from Morricone, this is the best thing Tarantino has done in twenty years.
So aside from the beginning being a little too long, which on hindsight, does benefit the later scenes, The Hateful Eight is one wonderful film, and proves Tarantino is a master storyteller who is still at the top of his game.....