The Hateful Eight

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

3/5

IT’S fashionable nowadays for many filmmakers to claim themselves to be “auteurs,” directors whose imprint on their films is so indelible it’s impossible to conceive of anyone else making them.

Love him or hate him, there can be little doubt that Quentin Tarantino is an auteur, making films so amply decorated with expletives, overt violence and an apparently passionate desire to break boundaries that, for better or worse, they could not be attributed to any other.

In this fascinating, violent riff on Italian Westerns — think spaghetti drenched with lashings of fresh blood rather than bolognese — the writer-director stakes his authorial claim in the opening title: “The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino.”

It’s all accompanied by a picture-perfect score from the genre’s master composer Ennio Morricone.

Result?

There are some superb performances, notably Samuel L Jackson’s riveting bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren and Jennifer Jason Leigh, scary and all too convincing as the increasingly deranged killer Daisy Domergue being taken to be hanged by bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell, hiding behind a moustache of monstrous proportions).

Logic may not be the film’s strongest point but such is its compelling suspense and dramatic power that only after the final credits do questions about its narrative authenticity arise.

Tarantino’s unique creative signature is scrawled across every scene and the introductory sequence, set in snow-covered Wyoming where the stranded Warren persuades Ruth to save him and new local sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) by giving them a lift to a rural stagecoach station, is superbly staged and the vivid locations are brought to life by Robert Richardson’s Oscar-worthy cinematography.

Most of the subsequent action — and there’s plenty — takes place inside the increasingly confined setting of the stagecoach station where more strange characters, notably Bruce Dern as the ancient Confederate General Sandy Smithers, become embroiled in the mounting bloody mayhem.

It says much for Tarantino that he never fails to maintain a mounting sense of terror and claustrophobia in spite of a storyline that takes time to unravel. But it still somehow makes sense, while springing surprise after surprise.

Its cumulative power is made all the more potent by Tarantino’s division of his story into discrete chapters which make up the film’s three hours-plus running time.

Yet despite its length, it never bores, with the extraordinary and expletive-laden dialogue bringing Tarantino’s characters vividly to life and the cast delivering picture-perfect performances.

If you like your celluloid Westerns bloody, graphic and violent, this trademark Tarantino is for you.