Review: THE HATEFUL EIGHT

How Slow Hateful Racists Bastards Bleed


A Yawning 3 stars


Mini Review:

Tarantino makes a Roach Motel for his audience. You are glued to the seat as you watch blood and vomit and racist insults volley back and forth from bloodied mouths of people you don't care about.

Main Review:

You are not supposed to like this movie. You are not supposed to like the characters. They have been designed to make you puke into your popcorn. They are so awful you find yourself waiting for the grisly end you know Tarantino has planned for everyone.

Imagine a house in the middle of nowhere as a refuge to the worst characters you could think up, during a blizzard.

Now each character is carefully crafted to revolt. The heroine has an unpronounceable name. She is uncouth and her teeth are awful and she spits ever so often and is handcuffed to a magnificent moochdhari Kurt Russell who is a bounty hunter bringing her in as a murderer of many. 

Samuel L Jackson, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Micheal Madsen, Demain Bichir, James Parks are all marooned in the house... Each rougher and more racist than the other. Everything that Americans want to sweep under the carpet comes crawling out: the confederates, the yankee hatred, the racism against black soldiers, the crude treatment of women... just about everything unpalatable is thrown at you blithely.

Now imagine Tarantino making this movie in India. Toofan! All the RSS Hindu and Staunch Muslim guys stuck in one roof with moderates who have guns... Kangna Ranaut, Sanjay Dutt, Mukesh Rishi, Irrfan Khan, Ajay Devgn, Deepak Dobriyal, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Manoj Bajpai, and Amitabh Bachchan as the old racist General...

I have always loved the massacre of the Fighting 88 in Kill Bill, so the violent vomiting was fun to watch, and the bad guys killing each other was too predictable. My only grouse, is that the film is such a slow painful watch, as though someone is slowly turning the screws into you and you are in agony.

The film is set in a closed setting of a house, but the snow covered outside also offers an awesome spectacle (comparable to the scenes in The Revenant). I spent the slow parts imagining the Indian version of the movie...

Yes, you do feel terrible after having watched this film. It's like having secretly supported Donald Trump. Perhaps we are too used to being politically correct. And we need to see what supporting such people, such ideas might do to us.