Talky, gory, comedy-murder mystery in Western clothing

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2016)

The Hateful Eight is rightly classified as a comedy/drama/mystery and not a Western by the Internet Movie Database. Despite the promise of a title that suggests that the movie will be a Tranantino reworking of The Magnificent Seven and a much vaunted Enio Morriconi film score (that takes up no more than five minutes of otherwise music free film), The Hateful Eight is an Agatha Christie style, intermittently locked room murder mystery with Samuel L. Jackson as Hercule Poirot.
Of all the deadpan jokes in this movie, the ultra widescreen format is the biggest joke of all. If you are expecting Western genre defining landscapes then, for the most part, you can forget it as Tarantino confines the cast in a horse drawn carriage and a cabin in the woods. The content is talk. God how these characters like to talk. The hateful Eight is almost cinema for radio. They go on and on and on, dancing around their various inter- related identities, seemingly looking for the right reason to do what we already know Tarantino wants them to do: blow each other to bits.
I'm not surprised Tarantino went ballistic when an early script was leaked because the twisty turney plot twists are the main interest here. I'm not going to even entertain the idea there is something important being said about racial and gender identity here. Tarantino delivers his profane take on the world with hot blooded and bloody excess. The performances are as broad as The West is wide. You'll enjoy the film only as much as you can tolerate nearly three hours in the company of a misanthropic bunch of Basil Expositions.
In the end, only one question remained unanswered: why was this film ever made? If you are happy with the answer 'because Tarantino wanted to make it', then The Hateful Eight won't disappoint because, in the end, the director's output is a genre in itself.