Not the same caliber as Django

Rating: 6/10 (25 January 2016)

Tarantino renewed himself with Django Unchained, which all-in-all was an amazing movie, and all the main protagonists were highly interesting and amusing characters. With The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Roth, and Michael Madsen are basically remakes of characters from old Tarantino movies - now with cowboy outfits. If you close your eyes and listen to Jackson you would be inclined to think you were listening to Jules from Pulp Fiction... and Michael Madsen's cowboy is right outta Reservoir Dogs (his raised eyebrows, cool-look, was used up fifteen years ago). For me this pretty much ruined the movie - it seems as if Tarantino is just recycling old characters. Disappointing.
The other main disappointment was the extremely slow progress. Close to three hours, primarily filled with too lengthy dialogue and too many filler shots - with occasional blasts of gore. The story is simply too boring and lacks enough "story" to engage for such a long flick.
I get that Tarantino fans are all over this one with currently very generous review scores (probably ecstatic to see Jules again...) - but this one, unfortunately, is significantly weaker than greats such as Pulp Fiction and Django Unchanined. I guess we'll see average score come down to around a 7 in a while as the initial hysteria dies down. For me a 6/10.