How far the mighty have fallen

Rating: 4/10 (18 January 2016)

Quentin Tarantino has been one of my favorite directors since I first watched Reservoir Dogs on VHS so many years ago. I've loved every one of his movies before this, and I had very high hopes for this movie. That being said, everything past the opening credits was a slow slide downhill with a few bright moments. The opening scene establishes that John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell, with amazing facial hair) is a bounty hunter transporting a prisoner by stagecoach to the town of Red Rock so that justice can be served and she can hang. Because of some misplaced code of honor, he always brings in his bounties alive, no matter how difficult they are, and she is very difficult. His prisoner is Daisy Domergue, (pronounced Dommer-goo, in the first of many, many unfunny moments) a crass, mean character who has a bounty on her head for murder. Jennifer Jason Leigh is somewhat wasted on this character, whose main function within the film is to be as awful, disgusting, and annoying as possible. She's a better actor than this movie allowed her to be, and I pined for the amazing performances she gave in movies like Georgia, eXistenZ, and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. This performance, however, was not in the same league as those, mainly because there isn't much to the character. Samuel L. Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a former Union soldier-turned bounty hunter, who prefers transporting his bounties dead because it's less trouble. The first time we meet him, he has a stack of bodies on a sled. In the long, long, long opening scene, we learn that Ruth and Warren have met before and after a long, long, drawn-out scene demonstrating that Ruth has trust issues, they decide to form an alliance to protect each other's bounties when a new passenger enters their stagecoach played by Walton Goggins. Goggins plays Chris Mannix, an aw shucks kind of character who may or may not be lying about being the new sheriff or Red Rock. He reasons that if the two bounty hunters want to get paid, they should give him a ride. Tensions rise in the stagecoach as Mannix, a former soldier for the confederacy is seated next to Warren. On top of all this exposition and pointless exercises in trust and loyalty, there is a blizzard coming. The stagecoach can't get to Red Rock in a blizzard, so there is going to be a stop at Minnie's Haberdashery, a small inn in the middle of nowhere. When the group arrives, something is immediately off by the fact that the latch on the door is broken, and it has to be kicked in and nailed shut repeatedly anytime anyone leaves the building (this became less funny every time). Also, the usual innkeepers are mysteriously absent, supposedly leaving the mysterious Senor Bob in charge. Inside Minnie's, there is Oswoldo Mobray, the dandy British hangman, quiet cowboy Joe Gage, former Confederate General Sandy Smithers, and the aforementioned Senor Bob. At this point, the movie takes a turn and becomes a kind of locked room mystery after the coffee is revealed to be poisoned. And pretty much from this point on, I stopped caring altogether. Tarantino is known for his slow burn scenes and his brilliant dialogue. This movie had neither. The wit was absent, the tension nonexistent, and the characters flimsy. Tarantino's movies are all quite long, but this was the first that actually felt long. In the past, I've always relished scenes like the farmhouse scene from Inglourious Basterds. It drags on and on, but it can because the tension is razor sharp, and Christophe Waltz's Hans Landa is so magnetic. The Hateful Eight has no scenes like that, and the ones that do drag on and on feel too long. At one point, my husband turned to me and asked if I was enjoying the movie at all. It was evident from his face that he was not. I told him no, but I had to see it through to the end, give it a fair shot. Well, I gave it a fair shot, and I was disappointed for the first time in my longtime love of all things Tarantino. For years I thought he could do no wrong, but now I know he's human like the rest of us.