Sunday 17 January 2016

The Hateful Eight (4/5, Good)

The latest Tarantino film is exactly what every Tarantino fan waits for: violence, dark humor, insane dialogues and slow-tension increase scenes. Good film but far from being one of his bests.


After the masterpiece Django Unchained, Tarantino is back! Adopting the same narrative by dividing the story into chapters, the film is unintentionally (or is it?) a two-part film. The Part I is a slow film that takes time to introduce to 8 characters with a different background but who shares the appreciation for blood and death. These 8 scum, locked in a small-wooden house raved by a snow storm outside, discover a reflection of themselves. Each seems to reaffirm their superiority by past good deeds or present ones but they all fall into the same dark and savage side of the most primitive human being.  

Part II is actually the most "Tarantinean" of the two. He built a whole set and gave each character a strong label so that you could identify each of them easily. We can criticize he made this first Part too long and too slow making it almost uninteresting at one point. Where he achieve to make long and solid dialogues in Django Unchained, Tarantino fails to reproduce the same structure here. That is why the second part, bloody as Kill Bill and with a nostalgic touch of Reservoir Dogs, is the best. We actually enjoy the violence and we laugh. It is so grotesque that it cannot be taken seriously. 

What else can be said? All the actors are fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. We see old collaborators such as Michael Madsen, Tim Roth and Samuel L. Jackson. We see new ones such as Jennifer Leigh and Kurt Russell. All are fantastic with a special mention to Leigh: she stands strong against a group of men and shows her powerful acting to make her being the center of the story. 

Despite a slow beginning and quite boring at some points, the film achieves what any Tarantino fan asks for. It is a good film and we can see Tarantino's ability to establish long and slow character building whilst keeping an increasing tension in the atmosphere. Only great directors can do that. Good one Tarantino! 

Trailer: 


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