Samuel Jackson plays bounty hunter Marquis Warren, who gets caught in a blizzard en route to Red Rock and begs a ride in a stagecoach with another hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), and his prisoner, Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). I suppose there are precedents among spaghetti Westerns of the ’60s (like The Great Silence), but Italians are stoic about their violence, whereas Tarantino seems to be whacking off to his own mayhem.Īs usual, his foreplay is brilliant. It seems perversely crabbed, nihilistic, and shot through with cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
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He has gone to elaborate lengths to make this movie look like a classic widescreen Western, in 70mm, with a thunderously lyrical overture by the great Ennio Morricone and an intermission, but there’s nothing widescreen about his story. Much has been said of the delight Tarantino takes in extreme violence, but the unpleasant truth exposed by The Hateful Eight is that his wit and craftsmanship - his artistic soul - are inextricable from his sadism. Django Unchained is where he became his own yes man, and by the looks of The Hateful Eight, he hasn’t yet remedied the issue. After the thrilling convolutions - narrative and moral - of Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Reservoir Dogs, and even parts of Kill Bill, Tarantino has stopped challenging himself - or at least challenging himself in any way that matters to his growth as an artist. But for all its pleasures, I think it’s too easy, too dead-center in Tarantino’s comfort zone. This is Tarantino’s most financially successful movie, and a lot of people love its rituals of retribution. And however much I like violent movies, that’s not a good thing. Carnage rarely comes so morally uncomplicated. But the helpless rage we feel in those scenes is in the service of Tarantino’s larger goal: to make the vengeance on the film’s racists all the more gleeful. The only violence that’s not a kick is done unto slaves, who are whipped, torn to pieces by dogs, and, in a particularly ugly moment, driven to slaughter one another for sport. Every bullet generates a whoopee cushion’s worth of red sauce. What Nazis were in Inglourious Basterds, slaveholders are here: people who are a gas to exterminate.
Up until the release of this Western starring Jamie Foxx as a gunslinging ex-slave and (a wonderfully puckish) Christoph Waltz as his bounty-hunting German escort, I had loved, in one way or another, all the films that Tarantino had directed. It’s not laziness the feelings that come to you in the first flush of pleasure after seeing a Tarantino movie are difficult to recollect in tranquility. Note: I’ve mined some of my past reviews (the ones I still agree with, anyway) for descriptions. For better, and occasionally for worse, Tarantino really digs Tarantino. Few directors give you the sense that they’re getting off so much on their own work. ĭense with allusions to other work but more fun than a barrel of monkeys (studded with nails and rolled down a hill, à la Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 2000 Maniacs), Quentin Tarantino’s movies cry out to be viewed both singly and in relation to one another - as the journey of a boy who once lived through grindhouse movies and is now permitted to dramatize (and cinematize) his fantasies on an epic scale. We’ve updated it to include the auteur’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This article originally published in 2015 as part of Vulture’s Tarantino Week.
Photo: Maya Robinson and Kelly Chiello and Photo by Miramax
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