a cynical exercise in evil

Rating: 9/10 (14 February 2016)

The movies fans word is divided in two - those who love Quentin Tarantino's work and those who hate it. There is almost nothing left out, if you have seen a film by Tarantino you either liked it immensely, or you felt insulted, disgusted and exposed to the worst of the bad taste. You probably dreamed about it the night or many nights after. You did not forget it completely. And it hardly left you indifferent. 'The Hateful Eight' will just deepen the abyss between the camps. Tarantino made not only another film but one that will confirm everything bad that haters dislike and will make delirious of evil joy the fans who admit they are fans and those who still feel it's good to be cautious nowadays in admitting they are fans.
'The Hateful Eight' is full of quotes. The story is a crossing of action Westerns and Agatha Christie's mysteries - meaning that not only that there are a lot (and I mean a lot!) of gunshots, horses, two bounty hunters, one criminal on her way to be hanged and one sheriff (or maybe none) on one side, and characters that play roles and are being discovered by the smart detective via traps and dialogs (a lot of dialogs and I mean a lot!). The music is by Ennio Morricone who composed the unforgettable tunes of the spaghetti westerns half a century ago. There are references to Spielberg's Lincoln and to Tarantino's previous movies and especially Django Unchained which dealt with the same period and the racial relations from a very different perspective. However, if you have seen the film you will get to the conclusion that the quotes are intentionally non-respectful. The 'mystery dialogs' are long and verbose, and will make the action film fans checking if they did not enter the wrong cinema hall. The Lincoln starts and an apparent moral anchor to twist into an interpretation that I will not reveal but which looked to me like Tarantino telling Spielberg - this is what I do to the kind of themes you beat me with at the Academy Awards in 2012. Tarantino takes no prisoners. He is taking classical material, blending it, smashing it to the walls, shooting at it and spitting it back mixed with blood and poison. Sometimes literally.
Then, it's a movie by Tarantino. If you are a fan you will get plenty of the gore stuff you like, you will get villains who can look charming for a few minutes an commit atrocities or be victims of atrocities the next ones. It's a well told story which proves again that Tarantino is in the big league of American film directors (together with the Coen brothers, Scorsese, Spielberg and Woodie Allen) who can invent and tell a story like no one does out of America. Acting is superb to the point that we hardly recognize Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell or Jennifer Jason Leigh. The vision is kitschy, is dark, is violent, there is no place for kindness, no morals, no values. It's Tarantino.