Blazing Addle

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2016)

(Rating: ☆☆☆ out of 4)
This film is recommended.
In brief: The West remains wild in Quentin Tarantino's bloody whodunit.
GRADE: B
Filmmaker auteur Quentin Tarantino mashes up the (very) bloody spaghetti Western with the stagy whodunit to make his eighth film, The Hateful Eight, with decidedly mixed results. Again, he is all hell and brimstone spreading a vitriolic attack on the senses peppered with N-words and profanity, this time from the Book of Christie, as in Agatha, as his plot device spins its wheels to tell its gruesome detective story.
￼More content on shock value, both in his stilted dialog and graphic violence. the writer/director uses the mystery genre rather cleverly. Eight supposed strangers descend upon a cabin in the woods during a fierce snowstorm. Two are bounty hunters who meet along the way, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and John Ruth (Kurt Russell). Ruth is delivering his prized prisoner, a ruthless killer named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) when they become stranded there with five other odd bedfellows: Sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a racist (what else?) Confederate general named Sandy Smithers, and Bob the Mexican (Demian Bichir, overdoing a thick accent that would make Speedy Gonzales blush). One of them is not who he claims to be, rather an ally to Daisy, whose sole purpose is to free her at any cost. All are thoroughly unlikable characters caught in a Ten Little Indians set-up (minus the Indians), as one by one they bite the dust while we moviegoers try to find the culprit at large.
￼The director has assembled many actors from his past films who know his quick rhythms and pacing technique while adding new members to his repertoire company and the end result is a nice invigorating ensemble. The acting is consistently strong with fine work by Mr. Jackson, Mr. Russell, and a memorable star turn by Ms. Leigh who makes the most of her showy role. However, Tarantino directs his actors as if it were in a theatrical set piece. As these snowbound travelers remain cabin-bound, the story become earthbound with its very stagy direction. One wishes for more wintry vistas rather than the majority of the film's small confines of the log house to hold our interest. One also wishes that the director would have hired another actor rather than use his own nasal reading to do the voice-over work.
But the film's running length is even more of the problem, as it becomes tiresome and incongruous with much of what is said and done needing more concise direction. We all know Mr, Tarantino goes off on tangents, with a sharp emphasis on his second syllable of his last name. This time, the dialog lacks any clever invention and the conversations between the strangers is more strange than compelling. His attempts to connect our present world to the Wild West of yore is less successful, including the use of anachronistic phrases and songs. His lingering shots of sudden bloody mayhem undercuts the nicely built tension this time around and the film becomes derivative of his own stylish flair. One expects a bloodbath and one gets it by the finale. Less would have been more. (His previous film, Django Unchained, had the same problem with this reviewer.)
￼Still the technical aspects of the movie are spot-on with stunning cinematography by the talented Robert Richardson and the music score by the legendary composer Ennio Morricone setting off the perfect mood for this piece of epic filmmaking. Kudos to Fred Raskin's editing for making this claustrophobic world even more intimate.
The Hateful Eight is far from the director's best work, but it remains skillful filmmaking that shows enough vitality and edginess to overcome its flaws.
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