Watching The Hateful Eight, Tarantino’s eighth film, in which eight armed and dangerous strangers including Tim Roth and Michael Madsen are forced to wait out a blizzard in a hut, there was a strong sense of déjà vu.
It could be because I re-watched Reservoir Dogs last night and in that film, eight armed and dangerous strangers including Tim Roth and Michael Madsen are forced to wait out in a warehouse after a robbery went wrong.
However, moving swiftly past my flippancy, both films are predominantly ‘bottle films’ covering the same themes of suspicion and betrayal, and contain buckets of blood, enough to even make Dracula pause for thought. Both films are also split into chapters that inform the audience about specific characters. In some ways The Hateful Eight is what Reservoir Dogs would have been had Tarantino had a bigger budget and access to a shitload of cowboy hats.
It may appear like I’m excoriating the film – I’m not. The Hateful Eight carefully sows seeds of tension, mistrust and duplicity very early on and it is a pleasure to watch them grow. Allegiances switch faster than me when I come across Keeping Up With The Kardashians on TV. The bottle nature of the film and the wide 70mm canvas creates an aura of watching a stage performance rather than a film – one can see all the characters in a single shot most of the time. It adds to the air of claustrophobia and intensity of the situation.
Moreover, I was always going to enjoy seeing Samuel L. Jackson and Tim Roth tuck into Tarantino dialogue in a confined space. It’s also good to see Walton Goggins (who looks like he just came straight from the set of Justified) receive the international recognition he deserves.
The Hateful Eight’s forte is the way it constantly evolves to keep the viewer intrigued. At first the film adopts the classic features of a Western, then it becomes more like a very profane Agatha Christie murder mystery all the while throwing in Hammer Horror levels of gore.
In the context of Tarantino himself, the film feels like a tying-up of the threads from all of his previous films into one big knot to show how much he has evolved. The set-up of Reservoir Dogs, the manipulation of the audience’s perception of chronology as seen in Pulp Fiction and the… uh… Western-ness of Django Unchained, are all very palpable and don’t feel out of place.
Ultimately though you leave the cinema knowing that what you have just witnessed was good – a solid and fun cinematic start to the year – but it’s a testament to the greatness of the screenwriter and director that you’re slightly disappointed it didn’t blow you away. 3/5
Check out the rest of the latest cinema releases in our new film reviews section, including other super-manly Oscar contenders The Revenant and Rocky sequel Creed.
