“There's a conversation about a dead horse early on in The Hateful Eight, and it's a doozy. I won't give you a blow-by-blow of that conversation since its mainly pleasurable thanks to the scene's blocking, pacing, and acting. The short-short version: a man's horse dies, and he consequently kills its murderer. The horse wasn't his favorite, but it's the principle of the thing, as Samuel L. Jackson's inconstant moral compass puts it: you don't mess with man's ‘beast friend’ and get away with it. This conversation is patently absurd, but it seems to hold water in the moment. This is, after all, the first half of the film, where Tarantino only gently probes his characters' elaborate cover stories. Those stories start to fall apart in the second half, but not all of them do. He wants you to savor the discomfort of not knowing what these amoral survivors will do next. All of them have committed crimes, but some of them are halfway humanized by circumstantial peril.”
“The Hateful Eight is, in that sense, about the absurdity--or perhaps just the impossibility--of believing that violence can solve problems, that prejudice can be overcome, and that the future is brighter than it really is. It's a fitting capper to his last two mytho-historical dramas, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Like those earlier films, The Hateful Eight is firmly grounded in the language and sensibility of exploitation cinema, particularly spaghetti westerns, and blaxploitation cinema. So, yes, Jennifer Jason Leigh's character is victimized, but she's also worshipped in equal measure since her empowerment is of the punk/riot grrl variety. And yes, racial prejudice is dealt with with a cavalier attitude that speaks to Tarantino's potent cynicism regarding post-Obama America. But the film's aggressive nastiness works, and it works you over thoroughly. This may not be the movie Tarantino's fans may have wanted him to make, but it is one of his very best.” ~ Simon Abrams
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