★★★★☆
Never has there been a deeper lover of cinema than Quentin Tarantino. I’m not talking the kind of purist who simply favours film stock over digital, but the kind who releases his latest (in select cinemas) in the extinct 70mm Panavision format. With overture and intermission intact.
Seeing the 70mm edition with program in hand is the definitive experience, and considering the 187-minute runtime, that intermission is needed. As politically incorrect as ever, The Hateful Eight is a gloriously indulgent ride for Tarantino’s devotees.
But who are the Hateful Eight? A collection of lawmen, bounty hunters, liars and crooks holed up in a mountain bar during a furious blizzard. One is a woman with a $10,000 bounty on her head, and more than one are not who they seem…
Picture the bar scene in Inglourious Basterds extended to Lord Of The Rings length, and you’ll get the idea. Tense conversations at gunpoint punctuated by brutal violence are the order of the day, carried by the wit and ferocity of Tarantino’s dialogue and the rogues gallery he’s assembled.
Samuel L. Jackson takes centre stage as Major Marquis Warren, one of his most outwardly villainous characters to date and an excellent foil to Kurt Russell’s John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth. As the thoroughly disgusting Daisy Domergue, Jennifer Jason Leigh shines in a truly uninhibited performance. But for the joy he elicits every time he opens his mouth, the MVP here is Tim Roth’s exquisitely camp Oswaldo Mowbray.
The film is impressively restrained for a Tarantino flick, limiting its locations to this one wooden cabin and its surrounds, and every landscape or blizzard shot is exquisite. What makes them even more delightful is their pairing with the soundtrack, composed by none other than the incomparable Ennio Morricone: the man who invented the sound of the Western frontier.
Like much of the big T’s fare these days, it does run overlong and can often be reliant on its more controversial drawcards – you’d be hard pressed to find another film this year that drops as many horrific racist and sexist insults in its runtime, contextually appropriate as they may be. Even compared to other modern Westerns, it’s utterly brutal. The fun, of course, comes in how explosive and ridiculous the violence is, and here it borders on Sam Raimi levels.
It’s vicious, it’s irreverent, it’s full of bastards and it’s a three-hour commitment. But it’s Tarantino – you already know if you’ll like it or not. For those of us on side, it’s a goddamn riot.
The Hateful Eightopens in 70mm in select cinemas on Thursday January 14, and everywhere else on Thursday January 21.
