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    The Hateful Eight

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

    “The Hateful Eight” is an enjoyable film. It’s well directed, with unique characters, and it’s filled with memorable scenes and dialogue. You won’t even feel the 167-minute running time and that’s quite a feat. Despite all this, I can’t help but feel like sometimes it’s needlessly trying to be stylistic and the different genres clash.

    Set years after the Civil War, bounty hunter John Ruth “The Hangman” (Kurt Russell) is transporting outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock where she will hang for her crimes. When a blizzard forces the two of them and their stagecoach to take shelter in a haberdashery, a slew of characters emerge. These include Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Samuel L. Jackson few, if any of hem are what they seem to be.

    I was worried when I sat down in the theatre. I didn’t realize that there’s a truncated version for general audiences (167 minutes instead of 187 minutes) and the show I went to started at 9:40. That meant I was only going to leave the theatre around 12:40 am! Would this be the one time where such a long film would be too much for me, even in the theatre with those huge speakers and that gigantic screen? Would I fall asleep? I’m delighted to say that I did not because this is a captivating story. I never felt the running time because every character captures your attention, they all have their stories to tell and you can’t wait to see what happens next. There are many times where I had no idea where the story was headed next and I was sweating.

    What I like about this picture is that it keeps you on your toes. You don’t know who the titular “Hateful Eight” are (assuming that the title is actually a reflection or description of the film, I’m not actually sure that it is) When some clues get dropped indicating that some of these people are not who they seem to be, your mind starts racing. Did I notice anyone caught in a lie? Did someone act in a way that doesn’t seem natural? Did that guy give someone a dirty look, a piece of evidence to show that he knows something somebody else doesn’t? The best part is that even if there weren’t a “mystery” to be “solved”, you’d still consider this blizzard a treat. It’s forcing these people to sit down and exchange banter between each other and discuss how they feel. As you can expect from Tarantino, the dialogue sparkles.

    I gave “Django Unchained” a lot of slack in retrospect. I still love that movie and feel like the pervasive use of the n-word was justified there. In “The Hateful Eight”, it’s too much. There are so many racial slurs thrown about that it became offensive at times. It does not feel justified, and the film ends up feeling downright self-indulgent. I can guarantee you that if I used the same language as Tarantino did, people would be lining up to punch me in the face. Another problem with the film is the violence. It’s not that there’s too much, or too little. It’s that’s it’s gratuitous… but not in the way you would expect it to be. What we have here is a fairly realistic film with outlandish characters sure, but they live in a world where the laws of physics are the same as ours… unless someone gets shot. As soon as a bullet flies, it turns into a cartoon. It pulls you out of the movie and makes you think of “Itchy and Scratchy” instead of helping you immerse yourself further in the drama.

    One of the most interesting aspects of “The Hateful Eight” is that there is no one to genuinely cheer for, but you’ll find yourself cheering for them at one point or another anyway. Everyone’s a murderer, delights in seeing others die, is a racist, a rapist or another type of human being that you pray no longer exists in the 21st century. What’s interesting is that everyone is so detestable that you’ll flip between who you’ll like or dislike the most. All of a sudden someone will pull out their gun and you’ll find yourself worried that character X might die… and then you realize that an hour ago he/she was spouting the vilest racial slurs and you wanted them to die! It’s clever, but I also feel like sometimes, it just goes too far and at the end you’re thinking to yourself “I hope a sequel never comes out because I want to stay as far away from these people as possible”.

    “The Hateful Eight” is a movie that I would recommend you to see… once. I don’t know if I’ll be revisiting this one anytime soon because there are a few things here and there that on paper might seem trivial, but in the movie itself make a big difference. That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily disappointed or that I didn’t appreciate the movie. In this time of year when there are so many great movies playing, I say it’s worth your time to check out “The Hateful Eight”. (Theatrical version on the big screen, January 21, 2016)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  24.1.2016 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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