The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)

Tarantino clearly decided he wasn't done with westerns after Django Unchained and so here we have another round which sprawls in terms of running time and yet is confined in a one-room cabin for the duration. The director's trademark ingredients are all there: smart-aleck exchanges, the story retold from a different perspective, idiosyncratic choice of soundtrack, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth and Kurt Russell, liberal use of the n-word alongside many more gleefully inventive uses of racial and sexual epithets and last, but not least, the customary Grand Guignol bloodbath.
The story, then, is a simple one to hang all this ware on: a blizzard traps a bunch of unsavoury characters from bounty hunters to hangmen, murderers and racist war veterans in a cabin and suspicion between the strangers is rife from the outset. It heads in a promising direction as it turns into a murder mystery of sorts, but the boy Quentin just can't resist his bucket of blood, quite likely feeling a little trapped by the claustrophobic set-up he has stuck himself in, and when it flies, it flies to a more ridiculous extent than ever before. It's a shame after an entertaining first half, but it's probably too late to expect Tarantino to change at this late stage.

6/10