Films with Faceless: The Hateful Eight

Hey everyone, Good ole Fan Without a Face here. I know I haven't been doing much story writing lately but I've had other stuff on my mind, but I do want to try and give something to my profile, thus I decided to do a little review series I call "Films with Faceless" where I will review whatever movie I've seen recently, which considering I spent a lot of time at movie theaters will be fairly frequent and share my thoughts on said movies.

Before getting any further I should warn all parties involved that in these there will be SPOILERS I need to give spoilers in order to properly share my thoughts and don't want to piss anyone off. Just want to make that clear. For anyone who enjoys this segment I might be able to do this with other films that maybe aren't in theaters or perhaps move it on to TV shows or episodes of MLP depending on how things go.

If you like this idea please let me know, with that said lets get the flag ship review off the ground with Quentin Tarantino's Eighth Film

Before jumping into this I feel it's important to warn people that while I have seen several of Tarantino's films and recognize him as a good film maker, very few of his movies have ever really been such that I have enjoyed. At most I enjoyed Django Unchained and some parts of Inglorious Bastards but that is it. Still when I saw the trailers for this film I figured it would be fun to see, given how good his last Western Film was and this one would have a Mystery element to it, which could be fun. Thus I saw the movie and well, it met some of my expectations, but certainly wasn't quite what I was hoping for

Plot Summary

The Hateful Eight takes place in the cloud Northern Mountains of Wyoming and centers around eight different individuals who by chance find themselves stuck in a location called "Minne's Haberdashery" and are stuck with each other for two day due to a rather harsh blizzard. These individuals include an old Confederate War General, A newly appointed town Sheriff who was also a member of a rebel Southern Army, A local hangman, and the "primary" cast members, Kurt Russell and Samuel L Jackson as two bounty hunters, with Russell's character, John "The Hangman" Ruth, leading murderer Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, to the town of Red Rock, to as his name suggests have her hanged by the neck.

Of the titular eight members, most of the focus seems to be on Jackson's character Marquis Warren, who comes across like a combination of Django and Dr. Schultz from the last Tarantino Western, in that he can shot a gun pretty much better than anyone out there but is also very intelligent and observant, spotting little details that are otherwise overlooked.

The first few chunks of the movie are just meant to establish the characters, the setting and build up some connections between them. Some characters have met each other prior, others know each other by prior reputations for one reason or another and a good chunk of those connections tie back to Domerque, who Ruth is keeping a close eye on and paranoid, due to the fact that he aims to collect $10,000 on her head but fears someone may try to set her free or collect the reward on her head. The movie focuses heavily on building up tension and suspicion, giving pretty much every character a reason to be in the location and a motive or reason for why they may kill or attempt to kill someone else, which does serve as good tension building and for a time you do wonder who the traitor among the bunch will be.

WHATS GOOD

As far as films go this one is fairly solid, with the cast giving pretty good performances, mainly with regards to the "Hateful" aspect of the characters. Throughout the film every character seems to go out of their way to make everyone else hate each other. Ranging from physical violence, insults, and racial comments, you have no trouble believing these characters wouldn't hesitate to shoot each other or fail to understand why they would do so if given just a small amount of justifiable cause.

Admittedly most of the characters in the movie are just, okay, I mean they each have fairly distinctive personalities, though of the members involved Samuel L Jackson is the clear stand out, coming across as the wise, calm badass of the eight members who you know from the get go could easily kill any of the other seven before they had a chance to pull their guns. In many respects I thought for a second that it was possible that Jackson's character was possible Django from the previous film just older, as he does certainly act like a wiser and more hardened Django, which makes sense as he was mentioned as being a Major in the Union army. Of course I could realized that due to the timeline there is no way this would make sense, but it was still cool to speculate, as he pretty much acts unapologetically confident throughout the movie, saying to everyone in the cabin no to screw with him. This is especially highlighted midway in the story where Jackson actually hands one of the eight, the Confenderate General, one of his loaded guns and effectively goads said general into trying to kill him, completely confident he'll be able to shoot him before the the General can get a shot off and we the audience know that's what's going to happen. We know from the get go this isn't "Deep Blue Sea" where Jackson gets killed halfway through, no he's staying for the long haul.

The movie does also have some clever subterfuge as we believe we know whose gonna live to the end of this movie and possibly who the guilty parties are, but the film messes with those expectations half way through the film and shocks you with atleast two twists you might not have even considered unless you were watching the trailers for the movie more closely.

Of course all this said......This movie has a rather long list of problems that significantly outweigh the good

What's Bad

If you've seen enough of Tarantino's films then you're fairly familiar with a number of the tropes of his films. The over the top gore, the rather grim humor and a lot of dialogue between characters. Now I personally like Tarantino's dialogue moments, things like the Superman Discussion or Bills talk with Budd in Kill Bill were entertaining and I don't think I need to even talk about any of Christoph Waltz's dialogue scenes. Normally the conversations in these movies have a good mixture of wit and intelligence that makes them fun to listen to and also rewarding as there can be more to what is spoken then you may have originally believed. However, with that said the dialogue in this movie isn't quiet the same.

Part of the problem is that alot of the characters repeat much of the same things they have said to each other before, characters reintroduce themselves to people multiple times, mention each others reputation a lot of times. Occasionally there are some very gripping points of dialogue, like the intense stare down moment between Jackson's character and the General, which can be interesting to listen to. However, there is hardly any real humor to be found in the discussions and it doesn't come across as very intelligent either at times. More often then not it actually makes you feel rather bored and with how long the movie is, well that can certainly be a bad thing.

On the subject of boredom, this might be one Tarantino film where it felt like there was a lot of unnecessary padding involved. In the beginning alone we spend roughly two to three minutes just staring at a snow covered wooded cross with Jesus on it and the camera slowly pulls away, while a stage coach gradually gets closer to it. This scene is long, tedious and boring, usually in these opening sequences I've seen the angle change to show different perspectives, or perhaps locations and the like. Just holding on a single image for this long is painfully dull and makes it hard to get invested in the film. The same can be said for the time spent in the various shots of the stage coach moving through the snow and mountains. The shots are beautiful to look at, but there are simply too many of them and at times it feels like Tarantino included them because he realized that keeping the moving confined to a single area, I.E. the Haberdashery would probably get pretty boring.

I also felt some aspects or elements were introduced that could have played some significance in the story but never did. As mentioned this takes place during a blizzard and as this is the 1800s, the group doesn't have a built in bathroom but an outhouse connected by a line in the snow. I thought perhaps that might play a part in the murder mystery element, have someone go to the bathroom or something along those lines and have one of the killers take them out and make it look like an accident or something, but nope this elements is introduced, referenced once and never comes up again, raising the question of what relevance it even had in the first place. Once more there is a fairly large lack of tension regarding the murder mystery element of this movie or simply the mystery element. Near the second half of the movie someone poisons some of the coffee the group was drinking and this leads to paranoia that ultimately results in most of the characters getting shot and by that point we pretty much know whose the killer and who isn't. Turns out that of the eight members, only three of them were actually innocent while the other five were in cahoots with each other the whole time. On the one hand this does lead to some suspense as we learn this before the other characters do, but at the same time it would have been more fun and interesting to have a smaller group of antagonists and spend a little more time with the audience trying to figure out who is ultimately the guilty party. Just feels rushed.

However the biggest misstep in the movie I feel is just how far they go with the whole "Hateful aspect

Simply put pretty much everyone of the eight characters, save maybe for one is pretty much an irredeemable asshole, granted it takes some time to learn about how big of an asshole some of the characters are but trust me by the end you'll pretty much despise them all. This regrettably extends to even the "likable" characters like Jackson and Russell. Russell's John Ruth is an extremely violent kind of guy who strikes Daisy almost at the drop of a hat, and yes she's a criminal and everything and probably deserves this but there's a problem with this. To use a previous Tarantino movie, Django Unchained, there was the character of Calvin Candi. We of course remember this guy as he was meant to be the main villain, someone who we wanted to see Django use his gun fighting skills to blow away in a spectacular fashion and we waited with baited breath for this to happen. The reason for this was because the movie, from his very first appearance to his death, established him as being the most despicable human being on screen. Beyond him being a slaver and a plantation owner, Candi was shown to have zero remorse for the horrible actions he did, having no problem sicking his dogs on a weakened man and even having him display a level of arrogance regarding his supposed superiority over his slaves and even Dr. Schultz that you kept watching just to see this guy get blasted. In the Hateful Eight, we are only ever told that Daisy is a horrible person but never given any solid evidence of it. Sure she's rude to John Ruth, but given how the guy beats her pretty much every chance he gets, you can't exactly blame her. This in turn makes it very hard for us to even like Ruth, not helped by his insane level of paranoia towards everyone he meets, outright putting Jackson's Marquis in handcuffs while they ride to the titular location. Had we been given some kind of actual evidence of Daisy's cruelty, beyond her being obnoxious and rude, then we could have better understood while Ruth was so violent, but without such an example it just felt painful to watch, made more painful when at the end we watch as the character is hung by the remaining characters and it only feelings bitter or hollow as opposed to a victory to cheer for.

Even Marquis himself isn't safe from this asshole treatment, as there are moments when he comes across as unnecessarily cruel. As mentioned Marquis goads a Confederate General into pulling a gun on him so Marquis has cause to shot the general back. Of course this is in part due to the pair having a prior history during the Civil War with the General gunning down an entire regiment of captured African American Soliders, for purely racist reasons. You would think that this would make it easy to root for him right, WRONG! See Marquis ultimately goads the general into shooting by telling in detail how he killed said Generals son some time prior. Evidently the Confederate army put a bounty on Marquis's head and thus countless people went after him to collect it only for him to kill said individuals in response. Okay that on its own isn't a problem, that's self-defense and perfectly understandable. However, when it came to the General's son, well Marquis decided to be especially cruel here. Rather than simply kill the man or let him go, he and I'm not kidding when I say this, forces the guy to strip naked, in the snow, walk for two hours and then when the guy is so cold that he is begging for a blanket just to perhaps get a few minutes of warmth, Marquis forces the guy to in his own words "Suck his Pecker." That's right and he doesn't just say those words, he goes into extreme detail about the matter, openly mocking the General about this experience and taking delight in torturing him and his son, whom he did all this to simply because he was related to the General

......What can I even say to that. Okay, now I get it to an extent the son was trying to kill him and thus Marquis was within his right to take action against him and the general was a complete asshole who certainly deserved to have some kind of punishment taken against him. But this goes way beyond simple revenge and devolves into senseless cruelty, and it doesn't even feel justified in the end. I ended up feeling sorry for the General when I heard what Marquis did, yep I felt sorry for a Confederate General who admitted to killing an entire regiment of soldiers because he was a racist. That shouldn't be possible, but the amount of detail Marquis went into about how he tortured this guy's son, purely for his own enjoyment, well it frankly sickened me and make me actually want to see Marquis get shot, since he was just as hateful as the man he mocked.

This regrettably is the movie's biggest problem, in my opinion. all the characters are so cruel and unlikeable that in the end you pretty much want them all to die for one reason or another and don't cheer at the end when one or two characters have lived. I know that isn't always the case in these kinds of movies, but still you'd figure you'd have someone to root for in the end, right?

Final Thoughts

Overall, I thought the movie was decent and could be entertaining, but the long running time, unused plot elements and at times dispicable characters, make it impossible for me to imagine watching this movie a second time. Am I saying you shouldn't watch it, no, everyone has different tastes and views things in a different way.

You might enjoy this movie, you might view the characters differently and that's perfectly fine with me, everyone can have their own opinion and I have no problem if you like this movie. I just didn't quite care for it as much as I thought I would.

On a scale of 1 to 10 I give the Hateful Eight a 6.5 to maybe a 7 if possible. Good but not something I'll buy or watch again anytime soon. If you've seen the movie and have your own thoughts let me know and if you want to see more Films with Faceless let me know.