Quentin Tarantino has been making a lot of news lately with what some could consider “Yelling at the clouds” moments. His lasted “Get off my lawn!” rants have been directed toward actor Paul Dano. I’ll admit, he does kind of suck in a lot of roles. Some actors just can’t hack it in versatile roles. He seems to work best when he plays weak-minded or fragile characters.
But check out the late great Jack Lemmon in Kenneth Branagh’s star-studded four-hour adaptation of Hamlet. It’s pretty terrible. Sometimes, it’s a poorly written role. Other times, it’s a poor direction. And QT hasn’t really been the Sir Laurence Olivier he likes to think he is. His best role as an actor is as the blind, crazy street preacher in Little Nicky, mainly because his overacting was needed in the underrated Adam Sandler comedy.
Even though he has many opinions on horror movies, he has never really directed a straight-forward horror movie, even though he co-wrote From Dusk Till Dawn. And his movie Death Proof in Grindhouse was more of an action/road thriller, even though most of the movie is people hanging around talking a lot.
That’s always kind of been his weakness. And following the death of his editor, Sally Menke, his movies since then seem to drag on needlessly through scenes that should’ve been left on the cutting room floor. For a man who loves violence and bloodshed in his movie, he is apparently afraid to “kill your darlings.”
The Hateful Eight is one of the bottom echelon of movies in his film. I really didn’t like Death Proof. And if we’re being honest, his contribution to the anthology Four Rooms is even worse. Yet, The Hateful Eight is probably the closest he’s come to actually making a pure horror/thriller.
Part of the problem with the movie is how the script was leaked online as QT was preparing it. At first, he thought of turning it into a novel. But you feel he changed it up a bit for the worse. At 2 hours and 48 minutes for the theatrical release, it’s his longest feature film to be released as of yet.
(And yes, I know Kill Bill is considered one big movie.)
Originally, Eight was over three hours long at 187 and I’ve seen the longer version. There’s a good reason it was cut down because it doesn’t add anything to the story. Pacing is a factor in all movies. I had an English teacher who said a term paper/essay should be like a bikini. It should be short enough to be eye-catching but long enough to cover the necessary subjects.
For a movie that has for the most part just two settings over a 24-hour period, it can get painfully long. I know it’s intended to add to the claustrophobic tension of being surrounded by people you don’t trust, but there are times when this feels like a pastor’s sermon that won’t end or a telephone call with your mother right when the call is to be ended and she mentions something she talks about for 10 more minutes.
The movie is set in December 1877 in the Wyoming Territory even though it was filmed in Colorado. Maj. Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is a Union Army vet turned bounty hunter. He’s transporting three dead bodies to the fictional town of Red Rock. (If you’re a cinephile, you know that Red Rock, Wyo. Is the primary setting for the gritty neo-Western thriller Red Rock West with Nicholas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle and Dennis Hopper.)
Warren becomes stranded when his horse dies and he comes upon a stagecoach which has been chartered by another bounty hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell) who’s nickname is “The Hangman” because he likes to bring his bounties in alive to see them hanged later. Ruth is transporting “Crazy” Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh in her only Oscar-nominated role). Daisy is a violent and heavily racist person. She constantly refers to Warren using the N-word and other racial slurs.
There is some tension but Ruth agrees to allow Warren to come along as they’re both heading to Red Rock and paying the driver O.B. Jackson (James Parks) extra for transporting the bodies. They later meet Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who was a Confederate soldier and also quite the racist too.
It’s here with QT is building tension. But these scenes should’ve been tightened. Mannix says he’s on his way to be sworn in as the sheriff of Red Rock which neither Ruth nor Warren believe to be true. However, a blizzard is on its way so they will have to stop at Minnie’s Haberdashery to ride out the storm.
It’s here where they find four other people. Senor Bob (Demian Bichir) claims to be working for the proprietors who have gone to visit relatives for which Warren is skeptical as he knows what type of person Minnie (Dana Gourrier) and her husband, Sweet Dave (Gene Jones) are. There’s a former Confederate Gen. Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). Oswald Mobray (Tim Roth) claims to be executioner who will hang Daisy when they arrive in Red Rock. And Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) claims to be just on his way to spend Christmas with his mother who lives outside of Red Rock.
However, as the storm rises, both Ruth and Warren suspect that some of the people at Minnie’s are lying. Both Mannix and Warren recognize Smithers. But something is wrong. QT does a nice job of building the tension. Also, Ennio Morricone’s Oscar-winning musical score adds to the growing terror. And the cinematography of Robert Richardson in 70 mm film turns the Rocky Mountains into an ominous barren wasteland.
QT claims to have used John Carpenter’s The Thing (which also starred Russell) as inspiration. If you listen closely at times, you can hear Morricone incorporate some of the music he used for that musical score. And just like his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, there’s strangers in one location they can’t really leave worried about who is lying and who is telling the truth.
The following has spoilers.
Eventually, Warren probably out of hatred gets Smithers to aim a gun at him so he can rightfully kill him. Warren claims he was in the territory years earlier when he killed Smithers’ son, Chester Charles (Craig Stark). But he didn’t just kill him, Warren made him walk two miles naked through the winter snow and finally orally raped him.
However, this can’t really be trusted. Warren is called out for forging a letter written to him by Abraham Lincoln. He said he did this as a way to get white people to trust him more. This points to Warren being an unreliable narrator. It’s possible Warren didn’t even kill nor sexually assault Smithers’ son. He just knew it would make Smithers angry enough to try to kill him.
This also makes Warren a more questionable character. And then we also question Ruth. Despite getting second billing behind Jackson, Russell’s screentime is shorter. That’s because Ruth is poisoned and dies about two-thirds through the movie. As the movie begins, Ruth just seems a little gruff. But we learn he’s not such a likeable character. He’s constantly hitting and smacking Daisy when she says or does something he doesn’t like. At the haberdashery, he bluntly throws his weight around demanding that Bob, Mobray and Gage surrender their pistols which he dismantles and orders O.B. to dump in the outhouse ruining them.
At this point, QT pulls a Janet Leigh/Psycho moment. We also know that all bets are off at this point. I won’t reveal anymore because once we know what’s happening, it swifts more into an action thriller with fire-fights and people lying around wounded and bloody.
Goggins’ career was just on the rise at the time after being a character actor. And even calling him Chris, gives the man more of a feeling he’s not as tough as he would like to think he is. Russell has fun in the role playing one huge asshole. And it’s become well known he destroyed an antique 1870 Martin guitar on loan from a prestigous antique collection that he thought was a prop which received a great reaction from Leigh.
As for the only main female character, Leigh plays Daisy like the spoiled brat whose been sent to the principal’s office but knows her parents are going to get her out of things. It sucks she’s only been nominated for this one role so far. While her character in Single White Female had mental problems, Daisy is just a despicable person you have no sympathies for. I’m not really sure Jennifer Lawrence could’ve played the character as perfectly as she was originally considered.
It’s nice to see Roth back in a QT movie even though there’s some suspicion the role was written for Christoph Waltz. And Madsen, who passed away in July, makes Gage the type of guy who you really don’t want to bother with. Just leave him alone and he will leave you alone.
There’s been some criticism as to the violence mainly to the female characters. Not to give too much away, but only a quarter of the female characters meet deadly ends compared to the other three-fourths. And like slasher horror movies, the violence is exaggerated. Yet it’s not as over the top as that ending to Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.
Life on the frontier could be dangerous. I also like to think that Daisy is a representation of the accusers such as Carolyn Bryant Donham. In most Civil Rights movies, there’s always a woman ready to scream “rape” or “assault” just to see some black man be lynched. The movie is set one year after the infamous 1876 Compromise which pretty much led to the era of Jim Crow segregation. There was a back-door way to bring slavery back as black people were arrested and forced to work if they didn’t already have jobs.
Warren seems to take his role as a Union Army officer even with a checkered past as a sign of authority. In most of the territories at the time, the U.S. military functioned mostly as the leading law enforcement officers with carte blanche. And despite his past during the Confederacy, Mannix seems to be a more honest and trustworthy person than Smithers or the rest of the people at the haberdashery. He seems to offer some concern for O.B. who gets too cold performing Ruth’s order.
When the movie was released in December of 2015, it had its critics who called it Tarantino’s worst. Even though the first half of Death Proof seemed lackluster, the second half gave us a thrill ride with practical effects. Here once the twists are revealed, the final climax of the movie seems to last too long.
It should also be noted that the criticism over the violence especially toward Daisy wasn’t directed toward Ruth who I think has the worst death in the movie. Eight made over $161 million worldwide down from a considerable amount from the nearly $445 million Django Unchained made when it was released in 2012. Yet, Death Proof has the worst wide-release box office of his career as it only made $31 million against a $30 million budget.
I still like it better than Death Proof mainly because Tarantino did something different even if it’s still one of his worst movies.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 