If you enjoy westerns, do yourself a favor - don't watch this movie.

Rating: 1/10 (25 March 2016)

I'm a big fan of westerns. I've seen bad westerns and good westerns, comedies (Support Your Local Gunfighter) to dramas (3:10 to Yuma) to musicals (Paint Your Wagon) and everything in between...suffice to say I've seen my fair share of westerns over these many years.
I wish I could've counted this movie among them, but frankly, I don't really know HOW to classify it. It's definitely not a western, despite the stagecoach and the horses.
Let me elaborate.
Sheesh...where to begin? There was just so much wrong with this movie that it made you wonder if Tarantino started out making a parody, but changed his mind and made it a gore-fest pseudo-crime drama instead.
But hey, what do *I* know, eh? (Hint: probably the same as everyone who highlighted the enormous amount of anachronistic "goofs" under the "Goofs" heading...just sayin'...)
The plot progression was slow. Now this could be overlooked, if you are going for the spaghetti western style which, given the 1970s look to the title and the fact that even the score was done by Ennio Morricone, made me initially excited to see where it was going (even though I physically groaned as soon as I saw that it was a Tarantino film).
Still, hey! Kurt Russel, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh...it looked like it had promise!
And then the complete gratuitous overuse of the "N" word, just for shock value apparently? A few utterances, okay, but dozens? In nearly every scene? We get it...Jackson is black. Gee...who knew? Can we move on now?
No, because first we have to have Leigh get bloodied up to drive home the fact that she's one of the antagonists in the film. And bloodied up. And bloodied up. And...we get it. She's bad. Moving on...
So many scenes should have hit the editing floor and stayed there. No, no, I take that back...they should have hit the shred bin, never to ever be added back to any "director's cut" or anything of that caliber.
Case in point: the entire naked white guy being orally raped by the black guy scene...complete with very descriptive narrative...repeatedly...you know, just in case you didn't catch it the first time...
Next comes the massive amount of graphic gore that is completely unrealistic, doesn't advance the plot at all, and is added only for the sake that Tarantino likes juicy, gory splashes. I'm surprised he didn't go for making it 3-D. In a movie like Deadpool, it works. In this? Please...
I could go on and on and on, but I only have a 1,000 word maximum.
Seriously, it started out with the potential for being a great western...until about 20-30 minutes into the three hours when it became more than apparent that it was was just Tarantino being Tarantino again, using slang and other language that would never have been used in that era, with items that didn't even exist until the early 1900s, and turning people's heads into juicy sprays of liquid because of a single bullet (or two, as in the case of Señor Bob).
If you want to watch a western, don't watch this. If you want to watch a horrifyingly graphic gore-fest where people wear cowboy hats and say "Fu**" a lot and continuously use racial epithets toward one another (or if you're one of Tarantino's rabid cult followers who have been joyously giving this 10 stars and only doing so to counter honest reviews like mine), then go right ahead and "enjoy" this movie.
Or, you know, you could crush your toe with a hammer and laugh at the blood spray and scream the "N" word and the "F" word while looking at a picture of a horse in the snow...same results, really...it won't take nearly as long, and it'll probably hurt a lot less.