While I still think Pulp Fiction is probably my generation’s most influential film, Quentin Tarantino’s most entertaining film for me is Inglourious Basterds. That opening scene, between Hanz Landa and the poor dairy farmer, is one of the tensest, funniest, scariest, and most beautifully patient things ever burned to celluloid. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino attempts to sustain that note for nearly two hours in the snow-covered scenery of Wyoming.
The film opens on Major Marquis Warren, a bounty hunter played by Samuel L. Jackson. He’s sitting on a saddle which is mounted to a pile of dead bounties. The cold weather has killed his horse and the pile of frozen corpses amount to a few thousand dollars—if he can get them back to town. A stagecoach comes his way and he finagles a ride with the man in the back: John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), who’s handcuffed himself to Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a vile woman wanted for murder. She doesn’t seem to mind much when Ruth beats the shit out of her, which is often. Hell, she may even like it.
Along the way they pick up another suspicious traveler, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims he’s the new sheriff. Ruth—who starts out paranoid and becomes increasingly so by the minute—reluctantly agrees to take the man into the stagecoach. Unable to beat a blizzard, they hole up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cozy outpost with a stocked bar and a chess game by the fireplace. Ruth begins to suspect that at least one of the eight people in the haberdashery is planning to free his prisoner. When they ask Domergue herself, she says, “You’re right! Me and one of them fellas is in cahoots! We’re just waiting for everybody to go to sleep… that’s when we’re going to kill y’all!” The way she says it is both hilarious and chilling and manages to tell her captors nothing more about their predicament.
There’s a reason Tarantino uses Kurt Russell and music which was originally produced for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Surprisingly, that film has more influence on The Hateful Eight than the spaghetti westerns that so heavily inspired Django Unchained. Imagine The Thing, without the alien, and a western setting. That’s The Hateful Eight.
Russell plays the kind of confident dork he was in Death Proof, but it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh who steals the show with her over-the-top villainy, hilarious in the way she only gets meaner the more she’s used like a punching bag. I don’t think Samuel Jackson is quite as good as he was in Unchained, but that was a role of a lifetime; in this one he gets the most substantial monologue of the entire movie. The rest of the cast, including Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen, are perfectly suspicious. With any luck, Tarantino will do at least one more western before his career is over, but topping his first two will take more than skill.
The Hateful Eight is long, slow, and gratuitously violent. My kind of movie.
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