Eight down...two to go.

In one of his many excellent books on the film industry the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman said the easiest word in the Hollywood executive’s vocabulary is ‘No’, so you have to make it as hard as possible for them to give that answer. On that basis we must assume that Quentin Tarantino has never heard the word, or else why would we have films like The Hateful Eight.

Here are some, but not all, of the questions to which someone sensible should have answered in the negative at some stage in the proceedings.

Can I make a film in 70mm, a limited format so archaic no one uses it anymore? Can I make a film in that widescreen format and then perversely set most of it indoors? Can I make a movie that is so long it has zero chance of getting your money back? Can I do a film version of Agatha Christie? Can I write a script so shoddy and self-indulgent I have to pop up to explain it to the audience? Can I write scenes so long that Panavision has to make special magazines to hold enough film to shoot them? Can I suggest a false moral equivalency between sexism and racism? And finally, am I entitled to whine like a child because my film opens against Star Wars and most people want to see that?

If you get a yes to all of these questions then the resulting film better be Citizen Kane, but for all the fuss surrounding it The Hateful Eight for me is a pointless exercise in directorial vanity. The story is essentially And Then There Were None with a bunch of characters of varying degrees of unsavoriness trapped in a remote location by a blizzard. Sooner or later the tension is going to get to them and the body count mounts.

Tarantino sets his stall out fairly early in the proceedings. The stage in which bounty hunter Kurt Russell is transporting his fugitive, Jennifer Jason Leigh, to town is stopped first by rival bounty hunter Samuel L. Jackson, and then by Walton Goggins who claims to be the new sheriff of the town they are headed to. Within seconds Leigh drops the ‘N’ bomb referring to Jackson earning her a savage beating from Russell. This is repeated several times in the film by which stage the ‘B’ bomb is liberally applied in reference to Leigh. The brutality, humiliation, and indignity visited upon Leigh in the film is breath-taking but the argument seems to be that it’s okay to be misogynist because at least you are not being racist. I’m just going to leave that thought there.

Once they arrive at the staging post they meet a bunch of others trapped by the weather and from this point on all pretence at cinema disappears. Robert Richardson is for my money one of the best cinematographers in the business; the opening shots of this film are beautiful and must look glorious in 70mm. However once you are indoors, where most of the story unfolds, it’s wasted; this is essentially filmed theatre, albeit Jacobean but still theatre.

Tarantino has never been much of a storyteller. He is a writer of great scenes but has difficulty transforming those into a coherent narrative. Perhaps the best scene he ever wrote was the opening conversation in Inglorious Basterds between Christoph Waltz and the French farmer; that scene crackled with tension, suspense, and possibility. The rest of the film; not so much, to use one of the anachronisms Tarantino shoe-horns into The Hateful Eight. However in this film he seems even to have forgotten how to write a good scene; most of them are flabby, fatuous and incredibly self-indulgent for both actors and directors. The consequence being that when you stitch all of these scenes together you get a three-hour film that collapses under its own weight.

This is no one’s fault but the director’s. On a broader view I think the issue is that Tarantino’s creative well has run dry. He is a formidable repository of trash culture. In previous films he has successfully – let’s say ‘homaged’ although less kind words come to mind – material from great directors and famous genres. Now however he has done all of that and the only references he has left are his own.

It’s not so much a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes more of the Emperor’s Striptease; he’s been shedding garments for a couple of films now and there’s not much left by this stage. This is a Tarantino movie that has to rely on his own tropes; long scenes, lengthy exposition delivered by people with mortal injuries, moments that exist merely to shock like a child swearing in polite company. As such it falls flat.

It’s too long, the performances are generally pretty poor – is it just me or does Jackson start channelling pantomime dames when he appears in Tarantino movies – and the end result is just plain dull with spectacular moments of violence to jolt you awake from time to time.

Tarantino says he will only make another two movies. Let’s just hope no one says no to that suggestion.