The Hateful Eight: A Gory Whodunnit

I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino's movies and was hugely looking forward to The Hateful Eight. Having watched it, I can say it's exactly what you would expect from a Tarantino movie, and yet not as great as the ones that preceded it.

The movie is a western, set some years after the American Civil War. It opens with a shot of sweeping snowy vistas and a stirring score by Ennio Morricone (who else would Tarantino ask to score a Western?). A stagecoach rattles through the snowy landscape and one by one, we get introduced to the movie's main characters. Kurt Russell plays John Ruth, a bounty hunter who is bringing the fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock, where she will answer for her crimes and hang. They end up giving a ride to two stranded men: another bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and a former militiaman named Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins), who claims he is now the new sheriff of Red Rock. When they are overtaken by a blizzard, they seek shelter at a lodge called Minnie's Haberdashery, where they discover that Minnie has gone to visit her mother and left the lodge in the care of a Mexican man named Bob (Demian Bichir). There are three guests at the lodge already: retired Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), lone cowboy, Joe Gage (Grouch Douglass), and the English Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), who professes to be Red Rock's hangman.

As these eight people hunker down in the cabin, they start talking and unveil strange connections and coincidences. And soon, John Ruth starts to suspect that this is a trap, and one of these men is in cahoots with Daisy Domergue to rescue her before she makes it to Red Rock. Soon enough, things escalate in true Tarantino-esque fashion. While we get some flashbacks to flesh out the story, the majority of the movie takes place in this one cabin, and as the characters attempt to figure out who is betraying whom, we get some epic monologues, unexpected surprises, and plenty of bloody violence.

I suspect my problem with this movie was the claustrophobic setting. What I have loved about Tarantino's movies have been their epic scope. Whether we have a ragtag crew attempting to kill Hitler in Inglourious Basterds, a black man and German bounty hunter attempting to circumvent slavery in Django Unchained, or a woman who travels continents to enact her vengeance in the Kill Bill movies, Tarantino has always dealt with big, bold, and brash ideas. In The Hateful Eight, however, we have to rely on an extremely talented cast of actors who are locked up in a cabin and working through an extremely gory whodunnit. While I can't complain about the acting, the dialogue felt like it was recycled from Django Unchained, and having all that blood and gore contained in one room was ultimately too nauseating.

The Hateful Eight is emphatically a movie by Quentin Tarantino. And while it contains some genuine thrills and amazing sequences, it ultimately felt too repetitive and didn't deal in any fresh ideas. I will always look forward to a new Tarantino movie; all I can hope is that the next one is an extreme flight of fancy that tells a story I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams or nightmares.