Review for The Hateful Eight

The most recent film directed by Tarantino, The Hateful Eight takes place in the post-Civil War era, and fallows a group of eight strangers blizzard bound in a small Wyoming cabin. Unlike most of Tarantino's films that open with blood and action right off the bat, he takes his sweet time building it up, relying more on suspense then just jumping straight into the action (oh but trust me, its a Tarantino film, so you know there will be buckets and buckets of blood).  He spends over a half-hour on a stagecoach ride that introduces bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russel); his coach driver O.B. (James Park); his prisoner, the ruthless outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is being escorted to Red Rock to be hanged by the neck till death;  Red Rock's new sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a former outlaw that Ruth cant accept that he has become the new sheriff, and Maj. Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), an ex-slave turned anti-confederate war hero turned bounty hunter whose record of wartime atrocities makes Ruth distrust him and Mannix hate his guts.

Arriving at the cabin- a watering hole known as Minnie's Haberdashery- we are joined by a sprinkling of new characters. There is a smug British hangman, Oswald Morbray (Tim Roth, filling what might otherwise be the Christopher Waltz role), a furtive Mexican (Damien Bichir) who calls himself Bob, a smirking gun man by the name of Joe Gage (Michael Madsen, doing the whole Michael Madsen thing), and an old confederate general named Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). You can probably guess that his relationship with Samuel L. Jackson doesn't play out so well. The joint's owner, Minnie, is no where to be found and her husband is missing right along with her.
                               
I really enjoyed this movie, party because it felt more like an experiment then a classic western. It was almost like Tarantino took bits a pieces from all different types of Westerns, put it in a pot, stirred them up a bit, then drizzled it all over this movie. Another thing to admire about this movie is that it was all short on Ultra Panavision 70mm, a format that has barley been used since the 1960s. All in all this movie is not without its faults but is not without its praise, and I definitely see this movie if you are in the mood for a gritty mystery with plenty of cussing and blood.