Gore blimey! Tarantino’s back with all guns blazing
The Hateful Eight (18) Verdict: Bloodbath in the Wild West
HERE is not just a film by Quentin Tarantino, but the eighth film by Quentin Tarantino. That is how The Hateful Eight has been energetically promoted and indeed how it is presented on screen, an unsubtle dig in the ribs to let us know that we are sitting down not simply for a movie, but also for a cinematic event. The message is then amplified by a portentous overture lasting precisely eight minutes.
All this suggests a director who wallows in his own legend, which isn’t always good news for audiences. And, sure enough, if the great man had just ‘Tarantoned’ down his story of eight people taking refuge from a blizzard in the chaotic aftermath of the US Civil War, I’d have let him have five stars right between the eyes.
He’s a marvellous story-teller, and for the most part this is an engrossing story. It is ingeniously and wittily written by Tarantino, even though his fondness for the N-word stretches well beyond a desire for historical authenticity towards the downright pathological.
Furthermore, it is stylishly shot by his cinematographer Robert Richardson, and thunderously scored by venerable film composer Ennio Morricone.
But with rather wearying inevitability it is also a story saturated in blood. Glorying in violence for violence’s sake is so 1992, so Reservoir Dogs. Or if you prefer, so 2012, so Django Unchained. Yet here he goes again, with the hate-filled eighth.
Of course, there’s no point inviting Tarantino to locate his inner Merchant Ivory. His films ooze blood like doughnuts ooze jam; that’s just how it is.
At least this one has been given a suitable 18 classification. But it’s also worth noting that The Hateful Eight comes in two parts divided by one of those old-fashioned intermissions that used to afford time to buy a Kia-Ora orange drink from the usherette, and now enables folk to whip out their smartphones.
And what is particularly striking is that the first half, in which only a single shot rings out in anger, does not suffer in the slightest from the scarcity of bullets.
TARANTINO, like Sam Peckinpah before him, has become practically a synonym for screen violence, but actually he’s better at cold, creeping, gore-free menace. Easily the most memorable scene in 2009’s Inglourious Basterds was the opener, when Christoph Waltz’s chilling SS officer politely interrogated the French farmer. So it is here. The Hateful Eight is at its most gripping when the violence is still just a threat.
But what, after all that, of the story? It is chopped somewhat archly into titled chapters, beginning with ‘Last Stage to Red Rock’, in which a stagecoach ploughs through the Wyoming snow, carrying bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell with enough facial hair to stuff an armchair) and his prisoner, a foul-mouthed, almost feral outlaw called Daisy Domergue (a barely recognisable Jennifer Jason Leigh giving what might just be an awardwinning performance). Ruth is delivering Daisy to the town of Red Rock, where she will be hanged and he will pick up his $10,000 bounty But soon he has further company, in the form of another bounty hunter, former Union army man Major Warren (Samuel L. Jackson, manifestly enjoying himself), who is dragging two corpses with him. Ruth has met Warren before and treats him with grudging respect, mostly on account of a chatty personal letter from President Abraham Lincoln, no less, that the
major carries with him like his last will and testament.
The party duly expands by one more when the disreputable-looking Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins, also splendid) clambers aboard, claiming, to general disbelief, to be on his way to Red Rock to take up the role of sheriff. But when the blizzard intensifies the four, plus the coach driver, are forced to hole up at a staging post, Minnie’s Haberdashery.
There they meet the remaining four, making up the titular eight. These are elderly Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), a gunman of few words called Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a sinister Mexican named Bob (Demian Bichir), and Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a talkative Englishman with suspiciously refined vowels who introduces himself as Red Rock’s hangman.
The presence of Roth, Madsen and above all Jackson evokes several of Tarantino’s other films, what we might call The Previous Seven, and he makes sure we know this is deliberate by referencing them in other ways, too.
Jumbled chronology is a nod to Pulp Fiction, and there are plenty of others, to Inglourious Basterds and Reservoir Dogs especially.
But oddly, what the film recalls most strongly once the eight are holed up indoors, is an Agatha Christie mystery.
Hercule Poirot has no place with these rogues and reprobates, let alone Miss Marple, but the old girl would have recognised the building-blocks Tarantino uses, as slowly we piece together why everyone has reason to kill everyone else.
Who will prevail? Where is Minnie and her husband Sweet Dave? What’s wrong with the soup? Why is there a sweetie on the floor? With a few monocles and antimacassars it could practically be The Mysterious Affair At Styles.
Until, that is, it all erupts in a bloodbath as gruesomely spectacular as it is dispiritingly predictable.