Tarantino goes vile, vile West for 'Hateful Eight'
In Quentin Tarantino's nihilistic Western murder mystery "The Hateful Eight," killer cowboys chew and spit words the way baseball players expectorate tobacco wads.
When they finally stop yappin' and start shootin', stabbin' and poisonin', "Hateful Eight" dances into the realm of Western horror, where a furiously feral Jennifer Jason Leigh, with teeth bashed out and her body slathered in blood, reigns over a gory scene of mass carnage like a Stephen King frontier Carrie.
Oh, Merry Christmas.
For 187 minutes, you can forget about that good will toward men stuff.
Tarantino lights a lengthy fuse on his narrative dynamite during the film's first half, and it detonates during the second with a blackly comic, gory Grand Guignol storm of hate and vengeance precipitated by reprehensible characters convinced they're entitled to treat people like insects with their wings ripped off.
Tarantino's aptly titled "Hateful Eight" - his eighth movie and his first to be shot and shown in old-fashioned 70 mm. celluloid film (Ultra Panavision 70 in 100 theaters) - is partly a spaghetti Western, partly John Ford's "Stagecoach" and partly Ira Levin's "Death Trap" gushing with bodily fluids.
"Hateful Eight" comes with a heroic symphonic overture from Ennio Morricone (composer of the great spaghetti Western scores for Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" trilogy), titled chapters and a full intermission, parts of Hollywood "road shows" usually reserved for epic spectacles.
Yet, Tarantino's widescreen production hardly qualifies as a spectacle. After some handsomely composed introductory shots of winter storms over snowy Wyoming landscapes, most of the action takes place in the quasi-claustrophobic confines of a one-room frontier haberdashery called Millie's.
That's where the stagecoach is headed.
It carries cruel bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell, recycling his John Wayne persona from "Big Trouble in Little China") and Daisy Domergue (Leigh in total thespianic overdrive), a murderer he's taking to be hanged at Red Rock.
That's where bounty hunter and former Union officer Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) must go to collect bounties on the killers he's killed. Ruth reluctantly agrees to let Warren hitch a ride.
Next, a former Confederate soldier, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), appears on the road. He needs a ride to Red Rock where he says he's the town's sheriff. He's not happy riding with an African-American who legally kills white people.
But wait! We still have a hateful four left.
They're waiting at Millie's Haberdashery: a dotty old Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), a snooty Brit hangman named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a cowboy named Joe Cage (Chicago's Michael Madsen) and a Mexican (Demian Bichir) handling the haberdashery in the absence of Minnie and her husband.
Everyone seems to be connected to each other in some weird, Agatha Christie-like way. Ruth once saved Warren's life. Mannix served under Smithers. Smithers has a personal reason to kill Warren. You get the picture.
"The Hateful Eight" marks Tarantino as a filmmaker in full command of his universe, a bleak one at odds with the optimistically spiritual message of the holidays.
It's a movie to be celebrated for its rich dialogue, memorable characters and Leigh's gleefully full-throttle portrait of a female frontier sociopath.
But you might want to consider a shower afterward.
“The Hateful Eight”
★ ★ ★ ½
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Other: A Weinstein Company release. Rated R for language, nudity, extreme violence. 187 minutes