The Hateful Eight: Directed by Quentin Tarantino, Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, and Kurt Russell.12/29/2015 Give it time. If there is one thing that can be said about Quentin Tarantino's new epic Western it is give it time. That's for two reasons: 1. The film is 3 hours long. Not that this matters because the movie is pretty great, and 2. The tone here is a little bit harder to swallow than other Tarantino films. This is probably because there's no real good guys or bad guys in The Hateful Eight-just varying degrees of bad people. That means the proceedings aren’t exactly as fun as they should be. There’s no Mr. Orange of Dr. King Schultz who you can attach yourself too as the one sane, good man in the middle of the madness. The madness is everywhere, and may sour the tone of the film for some. Aside from that though every staple of Tarantino is here and firing on all cylinders: Samuel L. Jackson navigates Tarantino’s dialogue with ease, the violence when it comes is gory, and the dialogue is beneficially slow and subtle as the archetypes of the main cast clash. This less flashy approach does lead the film to drag a bit, but the film seems to want that to happen. Tarantino is certainly tricking his audience just as much as all the characters are tricking each other, and as soon as he lets one tone get comfortable he tosses in some madcap violence or REALLY, REALLY blunt social commentary. The Hateful Eight is operating on a spectrum of offensive to “Oh my god you can get away with that in a movie,” the result is a wonderful and sick mix even if it seems a little bit scattershot. That brings us back to tone. The scattershot nature of the script leads the film to be shocking, but not particularly positive or solid. What’s written is fantastic (Samuel L. Jackson gets great monologues) and the performances hold up (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jackson, and Walter Goggins absolutely steal the movie), but at times it just doesn’t feel right. As much as I would like to say that the uneven tone is created because of the gruesome violence, it’s more of a baked in problem. The film is simply trying too hard to play the audience, and sometimes in it’s small scale nature can’t pull it off. That said most of the time it does. Even with all of that The Hateful Eight is entertaining at all times. Tarantino has never lost his edge and it’s incredible to watch how the film twists and turns. Every second of The Hateful Eight is spectacularly looking especially in 70mm film. The image is highly detailed, and the roadshow edition benefits from a 10 minute intermission that really allows you to perfectly digest the hilarious event that happened just before. It’s definitely the best way to view the movie. The Hateful Eight is all over the place just like it’s characters, but it’s also a beautiful movie. The madness, and the writing is wonderfully unhinged and the actors sell the material- problems with it aside. 3 hours goes by really fast when you’re in the hands of master filmmaker. The Hateful Eight gets a 9 out to 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |