I can’t say that Quentin Tarantino is one of my favorite directors but his Pulp Fiction certainly led some of my earliest realizations that the cinematic world is larger and richer than I had imagined. I’ve since watched nearly all of his films and while they usually each have their good points, none can really match up to his earliest works. In particular, I thought Django Unchained was a beautifully shot but rather generic action movie. I probably would have skipped this one if it weren’t for the fact that the posters on Broken Forum had some interesting things to say about it.

John Ruth, a bounty hunter known for bringing in his targets alive when it would be easier to bring them in dead, is transporting felon Daisy Domergue on a stagecoach when he is accosted by Major Marquis Warren. Warren is also a bounty hunter and he was transporting three dead bodies when his horse perished in the snow. Knowing that they will not be able to make it to their destination Red Rock before the oncoming blizzard hits them, they make for a lodge known as Minnie’s Haberdashery instead. Before they arrive they pick up yet another passenger, Chris Mannix, who claims that he is supposed to be the new sheriff of Red Rock. When they arrive they find that another stagecoach has just arrived ahead of them and the whole group settles down, knowing that they will probably have to shelter from the blizzard for the next few days. Warren notices that Minnie is absent from the lodge and is suspicious of Bob, a Mexican who claims that she has left him in charge. Ruth is also wary that one or more of the others is secretly working together with Daisy to free her. When an old man sitting quietly in the lodge is revealed to be a former Confederate general, conflict also brews between those from the north and those from the south.

When The Hateful Eight was announced, its marketing focused heavily on the fact that it would be filmed in the higher resolution and rare 70 mm format. Special screenings were organized at the relatively few cinemas with the equipment needed to show this format. Indeed, the film is visually gorgeous with the outdoor scenes being both spectacular and rich in detail. But even shots like the smoke rising from the coffee cup of Marquis Warren, played by Samuel Jackson, are sumptuous. Still, it feels like Tarantino is indulging in a bit of a joke here as the vast majority of the film not only takes place indoors, but either in the cramped confines of the stagecoach or the hall of the stagecoach lodge. In fact this may be one reason why I found myself liking this a lot more than the other recent films by Tarantino. It feels very much like a throwback to Reservoir Dogs, in which all of the characters are forced to interact with each other in more or less a single location, except with drastically amped up production values.

Over the past several months, I’ve also found myself having high praise for visual directors who use almost no dialogue at all to convey meaning and emotion, Tsai Ming-Liang being only the most recent example. Yet while Tarantino is competent enough with a camera, this film makes it more obvious than ever that he is not a visual director. Instead he is director who loves to play with sound whether it takes the form of distinctive and memorable music or the cadence and sound of dialogue. He happily breaks the usual writers’ and directors’ dictum that storytellers should show rather than tell, using dialogue and even himself as a narrator to convey plot. He’s always been known for the snappy and witty dialogue in his films but more than that, he loves the sound of speech itself. In that sense, The Hateful Eight is a delight, full of all kinds of accents and funny little turns of language. Tom Roth, as a supposed hangman, even switches between a classy British accent and a Cockney accent that all but screams skulduggery. Witness how the characters carefully pronounce the unusual word ‘haberdashery’ and the name “Domergue” and you can tell that they are enjoying just having the sounds roll off their tongues.

Unfortunately the plot itself as well as the themes invoked here are weak and unambitious. Whatever Tarantino has to say here about racism or prejudice in general is puerile stuff and it gets uncomfortable when Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character is repeatedly smashed in the face as a sort of recurring joke. The film is better when you think of it as just a vehicle for endless homages and references to other films while skewering the genre of the Western epic as it has traditionally been presented. That’s why Kurt Russell openly channels John Wayne in his performance as John Ruth but is ignominiously killed without being given the opportunity to fire a single shot. One Broken Forum poster noted that Michael Madsen, with his quietly menacing, guttural voice is evoking Marlon Brando. Another suggested that just as the myth of the heroic Western is ultimately bullshit, this film is deliberately full of bullshit too: the Lincoln Letter is a fake, the size of the Domergue gang is probably a bluff, Oswaldo Mobray as the new hangman of Red Rock is an impersonation and maybe so is Mannix as the new sheriff. It’s even possible that Warren’s story about General Smithers’ son is a lie deliberately concocted to provoke him especially since it’s told in exactly the same style as a traditional tall tale.

In the end, The Hateful Eight isn’t a revolutionary film. Tarantino will never make another film as groundbreaking as Pulp Fiction. The fact that so much of the enjoyment in it is rooted in playing with the sounds of the English language also limits its audience. My wife had trouble following the stories that the characters tell each other. For Tarantino fans however, this film is a real delight. It neatly encapsulates all of the elements of his signature style, including his usual cast of collaborators, and has near perfect execution. It won’t change the minds of those people who don’t like his style and there are plenty who think he is over hyped. But for those who do, it’s is pure fun and there’s nothing wrong in that.