'The Hateful Eight': Is Tarantino's new movie worth watching?

Kavish Chetty reviews 'The Hateful Eight', a Quentin Tarantino Western starring Samuel L Jackson and Kurt Russell as bountry hunters trapped in a blizzard

On a precarious night in 19th-century Wyoming, eight strangers are hemmed into an outpost by a blistering storm. Outside, the landscape of the Wild West is buried beneath drifts of snow. Inside, talk turns to the usual themes in any Quentin Tarantino film: deeds of violence sharpened on the edge of a territorial masculinity, honour, humiliation, and of course, vendettas and vengeance.

When you amble down to your local cinema and see the barrage of posters for near-indistinguishable romantic comedies, it's easy to see that Tarantino's films remain a cinematic event, a unique moment of imagination and daring wedged between all that Hollywood candyfloss.

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Where else would you find a hero like Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson), a black bounty hunter with a cargo of frostbitten corpses he is hoping to drag to Red Rock for a handsome fee? Jackson plays the major with the deep, righteous anger he has become famed for. He is no timid descendant of slaves, but a growling, white-eyed pistol-whipper, a personality which allows him to stand undeterred against the atmosphere of poisonous racism that suffuses the post-civil war scene of The Hateful Eight.

Many have remarked on Tarantino's propensity to use the N-word, and here, together with that inauspicious term for a female dog, it serves as the glue which gums the dialogue together. On the one hand, it is grating to hear so much loathing; but on the other, the language creates a most persuasive environment in which to properly register the major's alienation - conscripted to play the savage in another's man history, he is always second-guessed, insulted, spat upon.

In the midst of the white hell of the snowstorm, the major hitches a ride with another bounty hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), whose ursine presence is heightened by a bearskin coat draped over his broad shoulders and a thick moustache. He is carrying his own precious freight across the snow-lashed countryside: Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a wild female outlaw who he hopes to have hanged in Red Rock. The wanderers seek refuge from the ferocious elements at Minnie's Haberdashery, a creaky old pit-stop where a gaggle of mysterious people have already made themselves comfortable.

The Hateful Eight constantly alters shape from the vast white wilderness to the claustrophobic chamber of the haberdashery; all wrapped up, as anticipated, with a denouement of gristle-bursting violence in which pink, tender inner organs spatter into an organic wallpaper.

This film is sprawling and overlong, and at times boredom sets in alongside the intrigue and excitement. But the scoring by Ennio Morricone, with its distant wail of a forlorn trumpet, gives an otherworldliness to this strange slice of alternative history, aided by the wind which whistles and roars , a feral presence constantly threatening to surge in.

The Hateful Eight is a weird, shape-shifting film, once again in debt to rampant maleness and guided by the director's whim to shatter all platitudes. It leaves a dark, troubled adventure in its wake.

Rating: 4/5