Well-Directed but Poorly Written, Hateful Eight is a Tarantino pound cake--thick but not fully satisfying

Rating: 5/10 (6 January 2016)

Kendrick Lamar was the best live performance I've ever seen. April 2014, he rocked UCF. However, we had to endure two hours of mediocre rappers before getting to the main event. By the time we got to the very good part of the night, we were emotionally, physically drained. Lamar did his best, but Orlando struggled to maintain the energy. This is Hateful Eight in a nutshell.
It is extremely hard to get mad at Tarantino and the Hateful Eight project as they went through extreme lengths to ensure that it felt, sounded, and looked like a Western straight out of the 1960s. From getting Ennio Morricone to compose the soundtrack to using the same cameras used to film Charlton Heston, Tarantino and friends reached far back into cinematic history and moved it to present day. This alone propels the movie to become a unique experience, as there is actually an overture and then an intermission about halfway into the film.
But leading up to that intermission is where the film really struggles. Throughout his career, the better Tarantino's script is, the better the movie will become—regardless of all the other intangibles. Death Proof's climax rivals as one of the best in the past decade, but the ho-hum dialogue and unlikable first round of characters prevented us from truly enjoying it. In the meantime, Reservoir Dogs is one of the rare movies in which literally every word said is important, making it one of the best indie films you'll ever see.
There is a lot of what I like to call abe dialogue (already been established) in Hateful Eight—leading to a lot of repetitive dialogue, repetitive conversations, and verbal revelations that we had already encountered. As a matter of fact, you could have cut the first third of the movie because the facts and characterizations created were re-created once the movie's setting becomes more claustrophobic and remains in the cabin. Part of Tarantino's magic was his ability to create awesome characters without revealing too much about them. Sadly we don't get much of this in Hateful Eight.
The Tarantinoisms (good music, sharp imagery, inventive directing) start taking off once intermission ends and the intriguing mystery begins, as the tension suddenly revs up. In the second half is when things become interesting and the actors (and lone main actress) can start chewing at the scenery. The words suddenly become important, the details become more prevalent, and the audience has become much more engaged. In spite of this, the length of the film and the over-indulgence of throwaway dialogue weighs down on you and never allows for Hateful Eight to really reach the quality lengths of Tarantino's other hybrid westerns like Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds.
Hateful Eight is like a large fluffy pound cake, a lot of density but lacking in flavor and substance. Tarantino directed this with his usual precision and quirkiness, however it lacks an outstanding moment, it lacks an outstanding character, and with the climax being delayed in favor of displaying past events it's hard to find the pulse of this irregular heartbeat.
In order for lengthy movies to maintain interest you have to cover a lot of ground in terms of whether years or space. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly covers an insane amount of Western territory, leading to every minute being required. Shawshank Redemption covers over two decades of prison life, so it too needed every minute. Hateful Eight is a cinematic bottle episode that could have been much shorter, much tighter, and with that each detail and word being much more vital.
Somewhere in that cabin lies a good story, and overall a good movie. You just have to get past the thicket of words to find it.