Two years ago, the writer-director Quentin Tarantino announced his next picture would be a Western called The Hateful Eight. He sent his script to a few people, and it was leaked. Tarantino announced that he would not be making The Hateful Eight after all because he was so furious. Then he reversed his decision and made The Hateful Eight anyway. Having now seen the product of his filmmaking labor, I can only wonder whether his initial impulse to kill the project truly resulted from his anger—or whether it was because some part of him knew the script was terrible and the movie he would make from it would be a train wreck.
Because the script is terrible. And The Hateful Eight is a train wreck.
Now, The Hateful Eight is an interesting train wreck—because whatever else one can say about Tarantino, and there are a great many uncomplimentary things one can say about him, he is incapable of being uninteresting. But The Hateful Eight is primarily of interest because it is so completely and thoroughly misconceived. Tarantino’s script is, basically, what they used to call a drawing room mystery, in which a crime is committed, the characters are stuck together in one place, and the question of who committed the crime is played out.
It’s set in Wyoming a decade or two after the end of the Civil War. Kurt Russell is in a stagecoach bringing a prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock to collect a $10,000 bounty. Samuel L. Jackson is a fellow bounty hunter, and he’s stuck: A blizzard is on the way, his horse has died, and he is toting the corpses of three criminals to Red Rock to collect the reward. Russell gives him a lift, and they soon come upon the equally stranded Walton Goggins (late of the great TV series Justified), who’s on his way to Red Rock to become its sheriff. They ride to a way station called Minnie’s Haberdashery, where they come upon four men with whom they have to wait out the blizzard.
Just getting to this point in the tale takes more than an hour of screen time, which suggests the nature of the train wreck: The Hateful Eight is as distended a movie as you will ever see. The movie runs for three hours. Indeed, if you see it displayed in 70 millimeter in the manner Tarantino would prefer, it’s more like 3 hours and 10 minutes—because the 70-millimeter version features an overture and an intermission, in the manner of Gone with the Wind and the David Lean movies of the 1960s.
Which is crazy. This is a small-scale story, set almost entirely indoors, that can only be effective if it generates a feeling of claustrophobia among its characters and the audience. But Tarantino has filmed it as though it were Lawrence of Arabia, which takes place across the sands of Araby, or Doctor Zhivago, against the vastness of Siberia. I suspect he gussied it up in this way because—again—somewhere inside him he knew he had produced a subpar screenplay of limited interest and decided to mask its deficiencies by lending the proceedings an epic grandeur they do not possess or deserve.
Gregory Peck once starred in an Alfred Hitchcock misfire called The Paradine Case, a simple story about a lawsuit that became afflicted with a similar case of elephantiasis due to the interference of its producer, David O. Selznick. Peck asked Selznick why he was mucking about with it so much. Selznick replied that he felt, with every picture, that he had to match or outdo his masterpiece, Gone with the Wind.
I suspect that Tarantino felt the same way about The Hateful Eight. It follows two astoundingly audacious pictures, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, in which he dared to rewrite the history of World War II and reengineer the story of antebellum slavery. The Hateful Eight is really just an itsy-bitsy whodunit.
Even worse, it’s a lousy whodunit. At one point, Russell tells Jackson that there’s one other man at Minnie’s Haberdashery who is in cahoots with Jennifer Jason Leigh and wants to rescue her. He’s right, and this is the point at which the movie’s plot kicks into gear. But how on earth does Russell come to know this? Despite moments when Tarantino literally rewinds the clock and tells the story from another angle, he doesn’t revisit the moment of Russell’s revelation. This is a colossal storytelling failure. Nor is the mystery’s resolution in any way gripping or surprising. There’s just a lot of blood and guts involved.
To the extent that The Hateful Eight is at all watchable, credit is due Tarantino’s particular gift for creating outsize roles and handing them to hammy actors who tear into them like Tiny Tim on Christmas morning. Jackson, Russell, and Goggins bring so much concentrated energy and enthusiasm to the goings-on that they alleviate the tedium to a remarkable extent. I don’t particularly like Quentin Tarantino; but I feel sorry for him, because I’ll bet he knew he should have put this one back in the drawer and, instead, let his solipsism, arrogance, and pride get the better of him.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
