THE HATEFUL EIGHT   3.2***

     Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker  with a unique style and voice. Above all else he carefully writes his characters into the story and they are often created as oddballs so that they are capable of doing most anything given their circumstance.  His inspiration for this movie obviously comes from spaghetti westerns like “A Fist Full of Dollars” and “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”, which contain the same slow pace with lots of dialogue.. Impatient people may see that as a bad thing, but the best stories are the ones that are being told by  fascinating characters who have their own pace.. He further connects with those westers by using Ennio Morricone for the film score and shooting the film in glorious 70mm using in fact the same 70mm camera that they used to film “Ben Hur” .

Some time after the Civil War, bounty hunter, ,retired Union Major Marquis Warren (played by Samuel L. Jackson) is trying to get his 3 dead fugitive bodies to  Red Rock, Wyoming so he can collect the bounty ( remember in those days it was dead or alive) It's cold and a huge blizzard is approaching, so when a stagecoach approaches, he asks for a ride. Inside the stagecoach is another bounty hunter, John "The Hangman" Ruth (played by Kurt Russell) who has captured fugitive Daisy Domergue (played by Jenifer Jason Leigh) and is taking her to Red Rock to hang. Soon after another  man Chris Mannix (played by Walton Goggins) also asks for a ride claiming  to be the new sheriff of Red Rock. The blizzard is about to catch them. So they stop at a large cabin which is a stagecoach stop called Minnie's Haberdashery. Strangely Minnie is not there and Mexican Bob (played by Demián Bichir)  says he was left in charge while the owner is out visiting her mother. Also in the Haberdashery is British hangman Oswaldo Mobray (played by Tim Roth) quiet cowboy Joe Gage (played by Michael Madsen) and former Confederate General Sandy Smithers (played by Bruce Dern). These eight rugged and suspicions individuals are throw together for what could be a couple of days until the blizzard blows over. These despicable human beings who might not be whom they claim to be spend a good 2 hours of this almost 3 hour movie engaging in biting exchanges ,full of sarcasm and even hate, laced with lots of profanity and abundant use of the “N word”. This is typical Tarantino.

Just like Tarantino's previous movies, The” Hateful Eight's” biggest strength is the characters and the dialogue.. They have  to be interesting, unusual characters, given that most of the movie is set inside a cabin .. Every one of these people are so well constructed that they seem like they have come from other stories and somehow managed to find themselves in this one.  With the characters comes a sort of a classic "who-done-it" mystery that is a fascinating scenario and  I won’t give anything away.. I can say that the movie feels like two halves; the first being the introduction and the back stories with the classic Tarantino dialogue while the second half is the bloody, violent reaction to the reveals. Parts of the first half felt a little too slow  but it all pays off later on when things are revealed and the action starts with sudden startling  twists and turns.

It’s rated “R” and that is a hard “R” for profanity and heavy use of the “N word”, sexual content, and bloody violence and gore including repeated beatings of the lady fugitive…excessive in my opinion. Despite all that I liked the movie but then I’m not bothered by the “R” factors and respect Tarantino for his boldness.

CLARK