The Hateful Eight
The Hateful Eight is a 2015 American Western film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern, as eight dubious strangers who seek refuge from a blizzard in a stagecoach stopover some time after the American Civil War.
The Hateful Eight
Quentin Tarantino
- The Weinstein Company[1]
- Shiny Penny[2]
- FilmColony[2]
- Double Feature Films[3][4]
- Visiona Romantica, Inc.[5]
The Weinstein Company[2]
- December 7, 2015Cinerama Dome) (
- December 25, 2015 (United States)
United States[2]
English
$156.5 million[6]
Tarantino announced the film in November 2013. He conceived it as a novel and sequel to his 2012 film Django Unchained before deciding to make it a standalone film. After the script leaked in January 2014, he decided to abandon the production and publish it as a novel instead. In April 2014, Tarantino directed a live reading of the script at the United Artists Theater in Los Angeles, before reconsidering a new draft and resuming the project. Filming began in January 2015 near Telluride, Colorado. Italian composer Ennio Morricone composed the original score, his first complete Western score in 34 years (and the last before his death in 2020), his first for a high-profile Hollywood production since 2000, and the first and only original score for a Tarantino film.
Distributed by The Weinstein Company in the United States, The Hateful Eight was released on December 25, 2015, in a limited roadshow release on 70 mm film, before expanding wide theatrically five days later. The film was praised for its direction, screenplay, score, cinematography, and performances, though the depiction of race relations and the violent treatment of Leigh's character divided opinions. It has grossed over $156 million worldwide. For his work on the score, Morricone won his only Academy Award for Best Original Score after five previous nominations. The film also earned Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Leigh) and Best Cinematography (Robert Richardson).
In 2019, a re-edited version of the film was released as a four-episode miniseries on Netflix with the subtitle Extended Version. The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's final collaboration with The Weinstein Company following allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein in 2017.
Plot[edit]
In 1870, bounty hunter and Union Army veteran Major Marquis Warren heads to Red Rock, Wyoming, with three bounty corpses. His horse gives out, and, faced with a blizzard, Warren hitches a ride on a stagecoach driven by O.B. Jackson. Aboard is bounty hunter John Ruth "The Hangman", handcuffed to fugitive "Crazy" Daisy Domergue, whom he is taking to Red Rock to be hanged. Warren and Ruth had previously bonded over Warren's personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. Chris Mannix, whose father, Erskine, led a Lost-Causer militia called Mannix's Marauders, claims to be Red Rock's new sheriff and joins them. During the trip, Ruth learns about the Confederate bounty on Warren's head for breaking out of and setting fire to a prisoner-of-war camp.
They seek refuge from the blizzard at Minnie's Haberdashery, tended by Bob, a Mexican who claims to be watching the haberdashery in Minnie's and her husband Sweet Dave's absence. The lodge shelters local hangman Oswaldo Mobray, cowboy Joe Gage, and Confederate general Sanford Smithers, who is planning to erect a cenotaph for his missing son, Chester Charles. Suspicious, Ruth disarms all but Warren. While Mannix recognizes Smithers as a war hero, Warren wants him dead as revenge for ordering the execution of black prisoners of war at Baton Rouge. At dinner, Mannix surmises that the Lincoln letter is false. Warren responds to Ruth's disappointment by saying his forged letter buys him leeway with whites.
After a small talk, Warren puts one of his guns next to Smithers and claims that he raped and murdered Smithers' son, who had tried to claim the bounty. When Smithers reaches for the gun, Warren kills him.
During the confrontation, the coffee is poisoned, which Daisy silently witnessed. Ruth and O.B. drink the coffee; O.B. dies, and Daisy kills the dying Ruth with his own gun. Warren disarms Daisy, leaving her shackled to Ruth's corpse, and holds the others at gunpoint except Mannix, who nearly drank the poisoned coffee himself. Warren deduces, with evidence, that Bob is lying about looking after the haberdashery and kills him. When Warren threatens to kill Daisy, Gage admits that he poisoned the coffee. An unknown man hiding under the floorboards shoots Warren in the groin, and Mobray and Mannix shoot and wound one another.
A flashback shows Bob, Mobray, Gage, and Daisy's brother Jody arriving at the lodge hours earlier. They killed Minnie, Sweet Dave, and all the employees and customers except Smithers, whom they spared to create a believable setting in exchange for his silence. Once they finished hiding the bodies, cleaning the store, and hiding weapons for future use, Jody hid in the cellar as Ruth, Daisy, O.B., Warren and Mannix arrived.
In the present, Warren and Mannix, both seriously wounded, hold Daisy, Gage, and Mobray at gunpoint. When they threaten to kill Daisy, Jody surrenders and is executed by Warren. The surviving gang members claim fifteen hired guns are waiting in Red Rock and offer a deal: if Mannix kills Warren, they will spare him and allow him to collect the bounty on the dying Mobray and the deceased Bob (whose real names are revealed as "English" Pete Hicox and Marco "the Mexican", respectively). Warren kills Hicox when he tries to persuade Mannix. Warren and Mannix then kill Gage (whose real name is "Grouch" Douglass) when he grabs a pistol hidden under a table.
Mannix hears Daisy's proposal but deduces she is lying. When Mannix faints from blood loss, Daisy hacks off Ruth's arm and goes for a gun, but Mannix reawakens and wounds her. Mannix and Warren hang Daisy from the rafters in honor of Ruth, who always brought his bounty to the gallows (which earned him the nickname "The Hangman"). As they lie dying, Mannix reads aloud Warren's fake Lincoln letter, complimenting its detail.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
The Hateful Eight grossed $54.1 million in the United States and Canada and $102.4 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $156.5 million.[6]
It opened in the US with a limited release on December 25, 2015, and over the weekend, it grossed $4.9 million from 100 theaters ($46,107 per screen), finishing 10th at the box office.[69] It had its wide release on December 30, grossing $3.5 million on its first day.[70] The film went on to gross $15.7 million in its opening weekend, finishing third at the box office, behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($90.2 million) and Daddy's Home ($29.2 million).[71]
Critical response and analysis[edit]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Hateful Eight holds an approval rating of 74% based on 337 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. Its critical consensus reads, "The Hateful Eight offers another well-aimed round from Quentin Tarantino's signature blend of action, humor, and over-the-top violence – all while demonstrating an even stronger grip on his filmmaking craft."[72] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned The Hateful Eight a score of 68 out of 100 based on 51 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[73] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported audiences gave it a 42% "definite recommend".[70]
James Berardinelli wrote that The Hateful Eight "is a high-wire thriller, full of masterfully executed twists, captivating dialogue, and a wildly entertaining narrative that gallops along at a pace to make three hours evaporate in an instant. Best film of the year? Yes."[74] Telegraph critic Robbie Collin wrote: "The Hateful Eight is a parlour-room epic, an entire nation in a single room, a film steeped in its own filminess but at the same time vital, riveting and real. Only Tarantino can do this, and he's done it again."[75] The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film five out of five, and wrote that it was "intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing [Tarantino's] own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale ... "Thriller" is a generic label which has lost its force. But The Hateful Eight thrills."[76] A.V. Club critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky gave the film a grade of A− and wrote that "with a script that could easily be a stage play, The Hateful Eight is about as close as this pastiche artist is likely to get to the classical tradition."[77]
In contrast, Owen Gleiberman of the BBC said, "I'm not alone in thinking that it's Tarantino's worst film – a sluggish, unimaginative dud, brimming with venom but not much cleverness."[78] Donald Clarke, writing in The Irish Times, wrote, "What a shame the piece is so lacking in character and narrative coherence. What a shame so much of it is so gosh-darn boring."[79] A. O. Scott in The New York Times said, "Some of the film's ugliness...seems dumb and ill-considered, as if Mr. Tarantino's intellectual ambition and his storytelling discipline had failed him at the same time."[80] Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter praised the film's production design, idiosyncratic dialogue, and "lip-smackingly delicious" performances, but felt the film was overlong and that Morricone's score was put to too limited use.[81]
Scholars Florian Zitzelsberger and Sarah E. Beyvers observe that the film follows Aristotle's unities: "Tarantino's film meticulously adheres to the classical unities of a tragedy, which had been seen as a necessity for the audience's immersion for a long time: 'The Hateful Eight' follows only one plot (unity of action), it is limited to a time period of 24 hours (unity of time)."[82] Hollis Robbins argues that The Hateful Eight is a panoramic Western chamber drama: "Tarantino's eighth film demands to be seen not as a revisionist but a newly visioned western, using the mythmaker's tools to offer a panoramic vision of racial sovereignty undone by random violence."[83]
Attempted police boycott[edit]
In October 2015, Tarantino attended a Black Lives Matter rally and publicly commented on police brutality in the United States, saying, "When I see murders, I do not stand by... I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers." Tarantino's comments received national media attention, and several police groups in the United States pledged to boycott The Hateful Eight and his other films. Tarantino responded that he was not a "cop hater" and would not be intimidated by the calls for a boycott.[84][85]
Forbes said that the film, while not as commercially successful as some of Tarantino's other films, cast doubt on claims that a boycott had a strong effect on sales.[86]
Race issues[edit]
Tarantino told GQ that race issues were part of his creative process and were inescapable, saying: "I wasn't trying to bend over backwards in any way, shape, or form to make it socially relevant. But once I finished the script, that's when all the social relevancy started."[87] He told The Telegraph he wrote The Hateful Eight to reflect America's fraught racial history, with the splitting of the cabin into northern and southern sides and a speech about the perils of "frontier justice".[88] A. O. Scott of The New York Times observed that the film rejects the Western genre's tradition of ignoring America's racial history, but felt its handling of race issues was "dumb and ill-considered", and wrote: "Tarantino doesn't make films that are 'about race' so much as he tries to burrow into the bowels of American racism with his camera and his pen. There is no way to do that and stay clean."[80]
Gender issues[edit]
Some critics expressed an unease at the treatment of the evil and sadistic Daisy Domergue character, who is the subject of repeated physical and verbal abuse and finally hanged in a sequence, which, according to Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com, "lingers on Daisy's death with near-pornographic fascination".[89][90][91] A. O. Scott felt the film "mutates from an exploration of racial animus into an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny".[80] Laura Bogart regarded the treatment of Daisy Domergue as a "betrayal" of the positive female characters in previous Tarantino films, such as Kill Bill.[92] Juliette Peers wrote that "compared to the stunning twists and inversions of norms that Tarantino's other works offer when presenting female characters, The Hateful Eight's sexual politics seem bleakly conservative. Daisy is feisty and highly intelligent, yet the plotline is arbitrarily stacked against her."[91]
Conversely, Courtney Bissonette of Bust praised Tarantino's history of female characters and wrote of Domergue's treatment: "This is equality, man, and it's more feminist to think that a criminal is getting treated the same despite her sex. They don't treat her like a fairy princess because she is a woman, they treat her like a killer because she is a killer."[93] Sophie Besl of Bitch Flicks argued that Domergue received no special treatment as a woman, is never sexually objectified, and has agency over her own actions (including killing her captor). She defended the hanging scene as in the filmic tradition of villains "getting what's coming to [them]", and that equivalent scenes with male villains in previous Tarantino films raised no objections.[94] However, Matthew Stogdon felt that as Domergue's crimes are not explained, her status as a criminal deserving execution is not established, breaking the narrative rule of "show, don't tell".[95]
Walton Goggins described the two survivors cooperating in the hanging as symbolic of a positive step to erase racism: "I see it as very uplifting, as very hopeful, and as a big step in the right direction, as a celebration, as a changing of one heart and one mind."[96] However, Sasha Stone, writing for Awards Daily, felt it was implausible for Domergue to "represent, somehow, all of the evil of the South, all of the racism, all of the injustice. She's a tiny thing. There is no point in the film, or maybe one just barely, when Daisy inflicts any violence upon anyone – and by then it could be argued that she is only desperately trying to defend herself. She is handcuffed to Kurt Russell, needing his permission to speak and eat, and then punched brutally in the face whenever she says anything."[97]
Tarantino intended the violence against Domergue to be shocking and wanted the audience's allegiances to shift during the story. He said: "Violence is hanging over every one of those characters like a cloak of night. So I'm not going to go, 'OK, that's the case for seven of the characters, but because one is a woman, I have to treat her differently.' I'm not going to do that."[98]