The Hateful Eight

After the huge success of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino has stayed true to the Western genre for his eighth feature film. But while there may be some minor parallels as a result, the films couldn't be more different. For The Hateful Eight is first and foremost a chamber play carried by its dialogue and its great ensemble, which takes place almost exclusively in a carriage and then in a small goods store. Only occasionally is the action taken outside, where images of snowy Colorado (which served as a stand-in for Wyoming) provide moments of breathtaking beauty.

The story of the nearly three-hour film is very simple: bounty hunter John The Hangman Ruth (Kurt Russell) wants to bring prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock. With an ominous blizzard breathing down her neck, Ruth picks up Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and Southern deserter Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who pretends to be the new sheriff of Red Rock, along the way. Together, they make it as far as Minnie's small goods store before the blizzard catches up with them. Here they must now wait out the storm with Mexican Bon (Demian Bichir), cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), Confederate general Sandford Smithers (Bruce Dern), and executioner Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth). But in the supposed shelter of the little shop, it's revealed more and more that the eight strangers haven't met here entirely by chance - and that certain death awaits some of them in here.

The Hateful Eight is typical Tarantino, especially in its final act. When the whole thing culminates in a gloriously over-the-top bloodbath after nearly two hours of almost exclusively talking, the master truly hits his stride. But even in the two hours before that, the film has a very high entertainment value. Despite the rather chamber-play-like staging, the work never feels like a filmed play. Tarantino proves to have a real knack for pulling visually quite great cinematic quality out of very cramped spaces. And even if the dialogues don't belong to the best he has written so far, they are full of wit and profundity as one is used to from him. And when they are performed as wonderfully as by this excellent ensemble, it's just a lot of fun.

Of course, Tarantino can be accused, as he so often is, of just cobbling together set pieces from other films. When a murder happens in the middle of a group of (supposedly) strangers, it reminds a lot of the detective novels of Agatha Christie. And very loosely interpreted there are even parallels to another movie with Kurt Russell, in which he - completely snowed in - had to find out who of the people around him is lying and is a deadly danger. We're talking, of course, about the horror classic The Thing From Another World, from which Tarantino seems to have at least borrowed the claustrophobic atmosphere. There are numerous other aspects of the film in which one could see obvious sources of inspiration. However, as with his earlier films, Tarantino can't be accused of simply delivering a cheap plagiarism and cribbing his story together. Rather, you can tell in every second of the film how much Quentin Tarantino loves cinema and how perfectly he knows how to pay tribute to all his great idols.

This is already clear by the fact that he managed to get old master Ennio Morricone to compose a new film score for him. But the images shot in 70mm on real film are also an impressive and also beautiful testament to Tarantino's love of cinema. Even though there are only a few movie theaters left that can show the film in this format and most viewers have to make do with a digital print, visually The Hateful Eight is truly a masterpiece. Dramatically, on the other hand, it may not be the best of Tarantino's eight directorial efforts to date. But even with some lengths and a certain recognition value of the story (at least until the last act), the film is still quite great entertainment cinema. And for this there is then also - with small deductions in the B grade - the top rating: Absolutely worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp