There aren’t many directors today who are allowed to shoot whatever they want. One of those lucky ones is certainly Quentin Tarantino, already a legendary American film outlaw who completely revolutionized American film back in the nineties. After the relatively conventional “Reservoir Dogs”, “Pul Fiction” and “Jackie Brown”, Tarantino completely released the brakes with “Kill Bill” and started shooting the kind of films that entertain and make him happy. Fortunately, what pleases and interests Quentin usually resonates with the audience, and the films he made in the 21st century are hard to compare with anyone else’s work.
Tarantino is allowed to do everything, so he can kill Hitler or Charlie Manson’s family, and all these films are at the same time an homage to cult and even pulp, exploitation films that he adored as a young man. It is well known that Tarantino is a big fan of westerns, and after “Django Unchained” his eighth film is a cowboy influenced by series from the sixties like “Bonanza”. Of course, all of this is spiced up with his wonderful touch, the perfect music of maestro Ennio Morricone, who was finally awarded an Oscar for “The Hateful Eight”, and great acting performances.
It is a film in which Tarantino masterfully mixed the concept of a classic western almost with a whodunit thriller, and all of this is seasoned with numerous surprises, excellent dialogues and incredible thrills, with which “The Hateful Eight” does not seem to last a good three hours. Again, of course, it is seasoned with violence, completely immoral characters, but damn, weren’t such people mostly the inhabitants of the American Wild West? The story takes place there in 1877 during one day during a snowstorm in rural Wyoming. Bounty hunter and veteran of the American Civil War, of course on the side of the Union, the black Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is stuck on the way to Red Rock.
The bodies of three criminals for whom rewards have been offered to the deliveryman are to be delivered there, and luckily for him, a carriage with another bounty hunter will appear on the way for him in the middle of that storm. John Ruth “Hangman” (Kurt Russell) is one of those who likes to bring trophies alive so that the hangman can earn his salary, and he also headed to Red Rock to collect the prize. And for the criminal Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). On the way to Red Rock, they will be joined by former Confederate officer Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims that he is the new sheriff of the place they are traveling to, and when it turns out that the blizzard is too strong to continue the journey, they will decide to wait in nearby Minnie’s tavern.
Except that there is neither Minnie nor her husband there, but there are already some suspicious guys who claim that they themselves have looked for a hiding place there, and very soon “The Hateful Eight” will turn into a hilarious and incredibly fun adventure. The way in which Tarantino mixed almost all genres here is sensational and the story divided into several chapters is brilliantly structured and hides countless surprises. As usual, the characters are extraordinary, funny, all of this exudes typical Tarantino black humor, and it will be a real shame if this self-taught genius decides to definitively conclude the film after filming the tenth work. Perhaps “The Hateful Eight” is not Tarantino’s best film, but it is certainly another in a series of his extraordinary and unique achievements.