Ponderous, longwinded, derivative and sadistic - yes, Tarantino's back

Rating: 4/10 (8 January 2017)

First of all some figures: The Hateful Eight cost $44m to make and in six months had made $145m - over three times as much. Those are the kind of figures producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein like, and while Quentin keeps the box office cash tills ringing, Bob and Harvey, or whoever else Quentin approaches with his latest script, will carry on saying 'yes, Quentin, of course, Quentin, and can I get you another olive for your martini, Quentin?' His previous two stinkers also made a lot of loot: Django Unchained cost $100m and pretty soon returned $425m worldwide; Inglorious Basterds cost $75m and soon brought in $321m worldwide).
Admittedly, those $145m came from someone's pockets, so someone and their friends must like the kind of cack Quentin has been turning out remorselessly since the very good Reservoir Dogs and good, though, not great Pulp Fiction. And you can't argue with such cash figures, you'll be saying. Well, if that's your line, let me remind you of the wisdom to 'eat sh*t, seven trillion flies can't be wrong'. Oh, yes they can.
Elsewhere on this site you will find The Hateful Eight lauded to high heaven and given superlative ratings. But you will also see very low ratings and criticism of various kinds. My advice: ignore the fanboys who might well enjoy gratuitous blood and gore as much as our Quentin. Go by what the naysayers have to say. Despite some initial great photography - not Quentin's department though - this is pretty dire.
To be fair, I don't think The Hateful Eight is quite as bad as Django Unchained, although it, too, has seams of bargain basement political correctness about race and colour running through it of the kind which is actually just as insulting to blacks. But it also has the same faults: an artlessly contrived plot, a horribly uneven pace, superficially clever dialogue which actually sounds only like superficially clever dialogue and an awfully stagey direction.
The Hateful Eight, in fact, comes across as a ham mystery play transferred to the screen by someone who has no idea that film has its own imperatives. Heresy? The boy Quentin doesn't know about film, I say. Well, on the evidence of this flat-footed effort, he certainly seems to have forgotten whatever you insist he once knew.
Quentin also manages to elicit from a respectable line-up of actors some pretty wooden performances: they all, even Mr Samuel Jackson, one of my favourite actors, come across as speaking lines from someone's smart script. They all seem to be acting, sometimes acting well, but still acting, and only the director, one Quentin Tarantino, can be blamed for that. He might know how to put together a bloodfest gunfight, but he often seems clueless as to how to give his actors directions.
Other reviews such as this one have tended to mention historical inaccuracies and other infelicities. I was surprised to hear one character describe another as 'paranoid' - what, in mid-19th century Wyoming? I don't think so. But my gripes have nothing really much to do with that.
My gripes have to do with the boy Quentin's filmmaking: he's just not as good as he obviously thinks he is. Not by a long chalk. The characters are stock characters, most of the films consists of series of one-to-one setpieces and his convoluted plots are only convoluted because that is Quentin's schtick.
In The Hateful Eight he even pulls a fast one: two-thirds of the way through we get a narration and a very hamfisted new element is introduced to get the ball rolling again. It's as though busily writing his script he had reached a kind of dead end and didn't quite know where to go next.
What Quentin needs is someone to tell him 'this just isn't very good, laddie, try again'. But while those cash tills keep a'ringin that really isn't going to happen.
The film is almost two and a half hours long, and I wanted to give up after an hour. I only kept going because I knew I would be writing this review, and it was only fair I saw the lot. On the other hand, if you want to give up after an hour, by all means do so. You will really not miss much at all and might even find something more useful to do. And you will even not have to witness a particularly unpleasant scene where a woman is hanged.
By the way: just how did two badly injured men, one of whom couldn't move at all, the other just revived from a fainting fit but who could also barely move manage to rustle up a hanging rope complete with a very professional noose from somewhere and get the hanging done? Oh, and if you do give up - as I advise - you will also be spared a particularly mawkish, not to say dishonest epilogue involving a letter apparently written by Abraham Lincoln to the black character. Oh dear.