The Hateful Eight

When was the last time they actually made a Western with young people in it? Remember the days of Young Guns with Emilio Estevez and a pre Aids Charlie Sheen? Seeing Keifer Sutherland score a hot young Asian girl while wielding a gun on horseback made it cool to want to run around town with a ten gallon hat on your head while you wielded a pistol in your hand. But now with the latest string of old men on horses and Texas’ new open carry law, you just sound more like a freak than anything else when you walk around talking about your desire to carry a gun into the local Victoria’s Secret.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve liked most of the old man Westerns that we’ve been exposed to lately, like Unforgiven and even Open Range, but I never walked out of either one of those films wanting to be like the characters portrayed in those movies. Instead I was more thankful for the fact that my only choices for a girlfriend weren’t the thrown away prostitute with a cut up face or the old testosterone laden Annette Bening. Thanks but I’ll take my chances trying to score the next Winona Ryder as I walk down the street plucking my ukulele while riding my unicycle.

Anyway, if anyone can pull off an old man Western it would certainly be Quentin Tarantino. I seriously doubt there’s another director in Hollywood right now that has seen and loves more shitty Westerns than he has, so whatever ode to that genre he had in mind when making The Hateful Eight was going to be thoroughly entertaining no matter what he did.

Sure there’s going to be two hours of dialogue versus only 20 minutes of real action while the n word gets overused like crazy; but that’s a Tarantino movie, and anyone who is surprised by that at this point shouldn’t be allowed to see anything higher than a G rated film. What he’s able to accomplish, in the way of setting tone, giving depth to his characters, and setting up unforgettable jokes, with his masterful use of actual conversation is what most writers and directors can only dream of doing with their stale use flashback scenes and montages. He continues to provide memorable scene after memorable scene with his simple use of words and camera angles; something that’s rather remarkable when you sit back and think about it.

Well in Hateful Eight you get more of the same as you are introduced to the ruthless bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a man who is known for keeping his captives alive just so he can see them hang. His latest prisoner is the vile Daisy Domergue, played wonderfully by the seemingly forever underrated Jennifer Jason Leigh. Ruth is on his way to a town in Wyoming to collect his bounty when he runs into Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), another bounty hunter who is trying to collect on his reward but is stuck because of the blizzard that’s overtaking the countryside.

Ruth reluctantly allows Warren to tag along with him because of a brief history the two have together but once they, along with another man they had to pick up in Sheriff Chris Mannix, come to Minnie’s cabin to seek shelter from the blizzard, they run into four more men they weren’t expecting to see. So now the nine of them (when you include Ruth’s driver) are looking at the prospect of having to spend at least two nights together in this cozy cabin while Ruth tries to figure out if any of the other seven people he’s with are out to steal his bounty from him.

And what comes to follow is close to three hours of beautiful 70mm shots of Wyoming’s breathtaking landscape, biting racists jokes that of course had me laughing out loud while everyone else around me shuddered in disgust, and some of the most intense and gory shoot out scenes you will ever see on film. Tarantino, as he always does, tries to take you out of your comfort zone, similar to what he did with Pulp Fiction when he made you laugh at someone getting their head blown off in the back of a Yugo. Well something similar happens in Hateful Eight whenever Ruth punches or elbows his prisoner Domergue in the face just after she says something insulting to him or someone in his company. It’s set up to make you laugh but man you feel like you should be drinking a tall can of Hi Life and wearing a white undershirt while you do.

And then of course there’s all of the gore that comes in the third act of the film. I haven’t seen that much blood on screen since, well, Django Unchained. But this film somehow takes it up another notch. The amount of mystery that also comes in this story gives you a little different feel from the revenge kick Tarantino was on lately and I have to say that this bloody version Clue was a refreshing break from all of the boring indie dramas that I’ve been exposed to lately.

If you’re not a super sensitive person, you will thoroughly enjoy this film because of everything I just mentioned above. However if you have a bit of a weak stomach and you get upset every time they show an interracial couple on TV, then you may want to avoid this movie. I rate this movie as very FRESH!