The Hateful Eighth, Good. Bad and then Ugly.... From Pekinpah to Platinum Dunes.

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2015)

I was one of the few people who saw the original run of Reservoir Dogs when it opened in the UK. After reading a review with a picture Tim Roth, swimming in blood with a freshly emptied 9mm, I was hooked.
QT's ground breaking debut was not a success on release, it only gained notoriety when it was pulled last minute from the TV schedule of Channel 4, who had helped fund the movie, primarily due to the cop torture sequence.
The media uproar drew enough attention for a second run in theatre and the rest is history, a legend had rewritten all of the rules and shot them in the face for good measure.
From that point on we were spoilt with the wild ride of Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Natural Born Killers as Quentin Tarantino was, quite rightly, hailed as a genius, but he seems to know this and that's where he falls down.
The steady pace of the more mature Jackie Brown polarised audiences, as did the 2 part Kill Bill, which I felt could have been told in one film.
Death Proof was pretty much unanimously kicked, Inglorious and Django were seen as a return to form even though their flaws (disjointed storytelling, last act issues, that stupid Australian accent) are widely debated or acknowledged.
The Hateful Eight is no different, with the added bitter disappointment that Quentin has not learnt any lessons from his last few outings.
The first half of his 8th movie is a master-class in cinema.
The opening theme is a statement, the cinematography stark and beautiful as the film unfolds in its own sweet time on Quentin's trademark colourful dialogue.
Kurt Russell's bounty hunter is dogged as his recent and sublime turn in Bone Tomahawk, Jackson is Jackson... 'nuff said, and Jennifer Jason Leigh looks like she's having the time of her life in her role as a gang member in chains who's every bit as brutal as her male counterparts.
Enter Walton Goggins in a role that seemed written for him, and on rolls the story to Minnie's Habbidashery where the mystery unfolds in true 'whodunnit' style reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs where we meet the rest of a perfect ensemble cast and things start to really get fun.
Until the sudden introduction of a condescending directors voice over...
Previously that day I listened to interviews with Aaron Sorkin and Harrison Ford, both of whom bemoaned the use of exposition for expositions sake, Ford quite scathingly inferring that it was a lazy device in a visual media, particularly when the point has already been made verbally.
For 90 minutes Quentin trusted us to patiently invest our time, drip feeding the mystery piece by piece as the greater puzzle started to fall into place through clues in the dialogue, vicious glances and suspicious body language, all shot in this epic photography when suddenly 'out of the f****n' blue' he starts describing what's going on, on screen.
At this point, the film lost me. I was completely taken out of it, like Django and Inglorious before, by a random, jarring, amateur swerve- ball. A turd in the punchbowl. It just didn't fit, it wasn't needed and felt vain. A lot like that Australian cameo in Django.
From here on the movie took a sour turn.
While not without merit, there was plenty of excitement to be had when the bullets started flying but when the violence escalated to epic proportions it lacked the visceral edge of Dogs or the sudden twists in Jackie Brown.
After his heavy handed exposition, the language started to feel clumsy and misjudged as the "bitch" and "n****r" count started to rise with gleeful abandon and the explosive gore-fest seemed less pulp fiction and more torture porn. It felt more nasty and mean spirited than edgy. A movie that had started out with ambitions of Pekinpah was now looking more Platinum Dunes.
Maybe if the film had been voiced by Sam Elliott and started with narration, maybe that would have sat better with me, who knows? But what is certain, is that I'm increasingly frustrated with Tarantino's growing propensity to almost give us the perfect movie, yet always seems to be one final, ruthless edit away from the true genius he is.