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Canberra Today 14°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / The H8ful Eight (R) *** and a half

ARRIVING amid a blare of publicity to offset its reported production cost of USD60million, Quentin Tarentino’s second Western and eighth feature runs for 168 minutes, except in cinemas still able to project 70mm film, where it might run for 187 minutes (apparently to play an Ennio Morrecone overture from 1982.)

On a snow-clad Wyoming plateau (actually filmed in Colorado!), a distant black speck develops into a stage-coach that stops in the foreground where a trio of frozen corpses blocks the road. The coach is under exclusive charter to carry bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) to Red Rock where the hangman awaits prisoner Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Having shot his exhausted horse, Afro-American bounty hunter Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson) wearing the dress uniform of a Union cavalry major needs a lift for him and the bodies so the Sheriff in Red Rock can authenticate before paying bounties on them.

Weather stops the coach at Minnie’s Haberdashery, some hours drive from Red Rock on a good day. Sheltering from the blizzard, a bunch of disparate characters played by a talented cast, few immediately recognisable behind forests of unkempt whiskers, tells the arrivals Minnie has gone to care for her sick sister on the other side of the mountain, leaving a Mexican to mind the store.

“The H8ful Eight” takes no prisoners. By the time the closing credits start, dead bodies are making messes all over Minnie’s floor. Tarentino’s screenplay makes no allowance for sweetness or light. It is virulently prejudiced. There’s bitter dispute about sharing the bounty money when they reach Red Rock. Perhaps a decade after the Civil War ends, battlefield enmities are alive and well.

Wallowing in gunfire, vituperation, mendacity, venality and other behaviours that continue in our day to blight American society, the screenplay tears shreds in the little behavioural niceties that movies use when they need to depict a sweeter, kinder, more traditional view of America. Cynical to the max, appallingly entertaining, unexpectedly credible, this is not such a view.

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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