Lengthy Disappointment

Rating: 6/10 (22 December 2015)

Quentin Tarantino has created another category of film, like Woody Allen. You know what to expect, and the film will deliver more or less what you were expecting. A Tarantino film is expected to be especially violent and harsh. The Hateful Eight runs 2 hours and 47 minutes, and it unfolds slowly, as you brace yourself for the inevitable bloodbath. In this film, the violence comes but not immediately.
The film resembles a stage play in that most of the dialogue and action take place in a single room called Minnie's Haberdashery. There are outside shots purporting to be a snowy Wyoming. The cinematography is excellent.
My problem is with the script, the language and the thinly drawn characters. The reasons for the shedding of much blood are varied. Some are blown away for racial reasons. Others are blown away for economic reasons. Some are blown away for revenge. Some of are poisoned so that they puke blood on the floor and on the faces of each other.
We don't get to know these characters well enough to feel hatred for them. So when they are dispatched from this earth we don't feel any real emotions. They are in a Tarantino film and you know there will be bloodshed. When it happens, you aren't shocked and you don't feel the loss of them. They are, for the most part, unlikeable characters or stone cold killers.
This is Tarantino's eighth film, and he has made better ones, and some much worse. You roll the dice with Tarantino. Sometimes you get something brilliant like "Pulp Fiction" or "Django" and sometimes you get beheadings and a fountain of blood showering the scene and an irritating revision of history like "Inglorious Basterds."
Not his best work.