There is nothing radically wrong with The Hateful Eight, but there is no reason why it couldn’t have been despatched in 90 minutes, even with all those plot twists. The story does not need the guts of three hours to work itself out, which also means it does not need the intermission.
You may find yourself wrapping up needlessly in the cinema, putting on that racoon or bear skin again inside, as a wild snowstorm pretty much blows throughout, punctuated and driven by Ennio Morricone’s powerful, sympathetic score. The score in fact is about the only thing that’s sympathetic, because the core cast of characters are to a man - and the woman played by Jennifer Jason Leigh - a bunch of no good critters.
The story unfolds in five chapters in a film which, as one might expect, deconstructs Sergio Leone. The opening scenes are brilliantly conjured, a fantastic carved Christ on a wooden cross, that blizzard blowing through desolate, mountainous Wyoming. A stage coach stops on a snow-filled track, effectively blocked by Samuel L Jackson nonchalantly sitting on a saddle astride a number of corpses of dead men.
Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bruce Dern
Samuel L plays the much-feared Major Marquis Warren who fought for the Union side in the recent Civil War. After some, ahem, colourfully mean-spirited conversation between the major and the driver of the stagecoach, the man within, John Ruth (Kurt Russell) suddenly points a rifle at the Major. Both men, as it happens, know each other, as they are both bounty hunters. They have that kind of grudging mutual respect which people who totally distrust each other tend to have. Within the stage-coach, Ruth has chained himself to his foul-mouthed murderous quarry, Daisy Domergue(Jason Leigh).
The Major is finally allowed travel on the stagecoach to Red Rock, the destination of just about everybody else we're gonna meet in The Hateful Eight. But nobody is going to make the town of Red Rock today or tomorrow, or indeed any day, because a good deal of blood must be spilt at the quaintly-named Minnie’s Haberdashery. Two stage coaches between them carry the hateful ne'er do wells of the piece and both make a stop at Minnies to disgorge their passengers.
Trouble starts when the fiery John Ruth insists that someone among the men holed up at Minnie’s is plotting to free his quarry Daisy, in which case he will lose 10,000 dollar bounty. He could shoot her dead,of course, and still claim the bounty, but he wants to hear Debbie’s neck snap at the end of a rope. Plus he says he likes to keep the hangman in business.
Jackson, Russell, Jason Leigh, along with Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, James Parks, Michael Madsen, Channing Tatum and Walton Goggins are on splendid form, but The Hateful Eight tends to be baggy where it could be taut. You could never say this about Unforgiven, another notably lengthy Western, albeit not a cod-Western.
After the intermission, which affords ten minutes or so contact with relatively civilised present-day reality - coffee, popcorn etc, holding the door for people - you find yourself weirdly having to step back in time and adjust again to this totally doggone corner of Wyoming. Reasonably good.
Paddy Kehoe
