The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight (18)

USA 2016  168 mins  Dir: Quentin Tarantino  Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum

A talky three-hour western whodunit that plays like an Agatha Christie drawing room murder mystery riddled with the toxic n-word, casting Samuel L. Jackson as an unlikely Miss Marple figure and climaxing with a bloodbath rather than a polite unmasking of the bad guy(s)? It can only be Quentin Tarantino, on highly entertaining mischievous form as he blesses his well-chosen cast with pleasingly pungent, occasionally ornate dialogue. It’s a good job someone coined the term ‘Tarantinoesque’, because nothing else seems appropriate.

The first two of The Hateful Eight‘s six ‘chapters’ are the most verbose, despite unfolding in the expansive wintery mountains of Wyoming – beautifully captured in Ultra Panavision 70, which was last used in a western context for How the West Was Won. Initially, one can’t help but fear that the entire film will get bogged down in dialogue just as its characters are about to find themselves trapped by an encroaching snowstorm.

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, gruff, whiskery bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is making his way by stagecoach to the town of Red Rock, where he intends to collect a $10,000 reward for delivering foul-mouthed, black-eyed “no damn good murdering bitch” Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the hangman. He’s naturally wary when the stagecoach is flagged down by loquacious former Unionist soldier Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson). But the two men recognise one another as they are now in the same line of work, though Warren expresses a preference for the less potentially troublesome part of the ‘dead or alive’ option and has three corpses in tow. As a blizzard threatens, a third man joins the party. Wily, insinuating southern renegade Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock who’s on his way to take up the post. And in case they’re minded to leave him to freeze, he points out that he’ll be responsible for paying those bounties when they reach their destination.

If there’s a febrile atmosphere of mutual mistrust aboard the stagecoach, that only intensifies when the bantering party is forced to seek refuge in the curiously named waystation, Minnie’s Haberdashery. Here they find a further quartet of sheltering rascally varmints. Minnie herself is mysteriously absent, having left the place in the hands of a shifty Mexican fella named Bob (Demián Bichir). Suave, silvery-tongued, bowler-hatted Englishman Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth, apparently channelling Christoph Waltz) introduces himself as the hangman of Red Rock. Taciturn Joe Cage (Michael Madsen) is a cow puncher. And sitting quietly in an armchair is aging, racist former Confederate general Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern). It isn’t exactly a spoiler to reveal that not all of these characters are who they claim to be and few will make it to the end credits.

Traditional whodunit enthusiasts might object that QT bends a few genre rules with his flashback-rewinds, and it’s probably wise to avoid any close perusal of the cast list if you want to keep the surprises intact. But the pleasure of this tense, racially charged western comes in his rich characterisations and attention to the kind of detail that no other director would consider (the front door that has to be repeatedly nailed shut, the path marked out through the mounting snowdrifts to the shitter). Then there’s the eminently quotable, often blackly comic dialogue, delivered with greatest relish by slimy Roth and watchful Jackson (“Only time black folks is safe is when white folks are disarmed,” remarks the latter, with a resonance way beyond the Old West). While it might seem a tad perverse to use the super-widescreen format for a film that occasionally feels like a theatrical chamber piece unfolding on a single set, Tarantino deploys it skilfully to frame his characters and explore their shifting dynamics, which initially resolve along the expected north/south dividing line. Anyone wishing they’d all stop gabbin’ and start shootin’ is unlikely to be disappointed by the gory climax.