Here are Quentin Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight,” the outlaws who meet in snowbound postbellum Wyoming, listed in ascending amount of facial hair: Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), Sheriff Mannix (Walton Goggins), General Smithers (Bruce Dern), Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), John Ruth (Kurt Russell), Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), and Señor Bob (Demian Bichir). Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy is the hateful eighth, and even she wears a mustache of dried blood for much of the film.
The plot is more or less that bounty hunter Ruth, “The Hangman,” is bringing Daisy in to Red Rock for a-hanging when a blizzard hits and they choose to shelter at Minnie’s Haberdashery, an ironically-named outpost in the wilderness, the pit filled with the aforementioned vipers.
Finding himself, as ever, impossibly clever, Tarantino used Panoramic 70mm film stock for what amounts to a stage play full of character actors beating a woman and pronouncing the n-word several times a minute. He seeks the sort of amusement you’d find aboard one of those mystery theater train rides, a cardboard version of Agatha Christie with more spattered viscera.
After the first couple of villains are dispatched, the only enigma to untangle is in which order the other cutthroats will expire-one moment a character is speechifying, the next you’re picking parts of his cranium out of your hair. Mobray says, “frontier justice is thirst quenching,” but that’s only true if you care to drink blood.
“The Hateful Eight” reveals the downside of letting people who erroneously believe they’re geniuses run the show laissez faire. For the second half of the film only, Tarantino makes the disastrous decision to add his own voiceover to prop up the story, a calamity for the narrative and viewers’ eardrums. He’s so insecure in his ability as a storyteller that he also includes a lengthy flashback to earlier in the same day that the main plot events take place, removing a potential element of suspense. In the opening credits, Tarantino adds the stagy point that this is his “8th” film…one doesn’t recall John Ford doing this when he directed, say, his hundredth film.
Even natural antagonists like Sheriff Mannix and Major Warren are not particularly individuated and you never lose the sense it’s Tarantino spitting every naughty word. After 25 years of diminishing returns he is still asking the same thing of his audience: “Humor me.”
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“The Hateful Eight” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated R. Running time 2:47. Visit cinemawest.com.
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