Unfortunately, his most recent film, The Hateful Eight, falls into the latter category, perhaps more so than any of his other films. Virtually everything about the film is calculated to outrage, shock, and unsettle, but to a degree that becomes overly self-conscious and therefore awkward. You can sense Tarantino straining to be Tarantino, to out-Tarantino himself, to continue putting distance between him and all the other film-geeks-turned-filmmakers who would emulate his unique mixture of originality and homage. That more than anything explains his decision to shoot the film in Ultra Panavision 70, which produces an extraordinarily wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio, and have it distributed via special road show engagement on 70mm prints with an overture and an intermission and printed guides distributed to the audience. This is an approach to big-budget Hollywood filmmaking that hasn’t been seen since the 1950s and ’60s (only 10 films have previously been shot in Ultra Panavision, the last one being Khartoum back in 1966), when the studios were desperately seeking to distinguish their product from the conveniences of television. The desire to return to an older cinematic form is not in and of itself perverse, since Tarantino has always reached into the past for the most salient ingredients for his cinematic concoctions; instead, the perversity arises from the disjunction between the format and the story he is telling. While large format film processes are usually associated with epic narratives featuring expansive vistas and large casts, The Hateful Eight takes place predominantly inside a single room, much like Reservoir Dogs, the Tarantino film it most closely emulates (it could easily be a stageplay).

Of course, Tarantino’s provocative perversity is leavened by his visual brilliance as a filmmaker. Outside of Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher, there is not a better director in the American cinema when it comes to composition and mise-en-scene, and Tarantino delivers again and again in The Hateful Eight, using that epic wide screen to compose his characters within the restrictive environment of Minnie’s Haberdashery, a way-stop in the snow-driven middle of nowhere. The film’s setting in the rugged mountains of Wyoming a decade after the Civil War gives Tarantino license to indulge in visual grandeur, and he gives us incredibly beautiful shots of snow-covered mountains, forests of leafless aspen trees that look like skeletal fingers reaching out of the ground, and expansive skies being consumed by stormy clouds (the cinematography is by Robert Richardson, who has shot all of Tarantino’s films since Kill Bill Vol. 1 in 2004). More so than in any of his other films, Tarantino makes you feel the intensity of the natural world (most of his early films were primarily urban in setting): Driving snow, howling winds, and bitter cold set an appropriate stage for a chilly showdown where the film’s unapologetically hateful characters warily circle and snap, racheting up the tension until the inevitable bloodbath begins.

However, before we get to the film’s primary setting, Tarantino indulges a significant portion of the film’s nearly three-hour running time introducing four of its primary characters. We start with Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former slave-turned-Union army hero who now makes a living as a bounty hunter, who we meet sitting on a pile of frozen corpses. He hitches a ride with another bounty hunter, John “Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), and his driver O.B. Jackson (James Parks). Ruth, who has an explicit John Wayne swagger and a moustache like a walrus, is currently carting his latest capture, a bitter, spitfire killer named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Red Rock for trial and hanging (the trial just being a formality, of course). Before arriving at Minnie’s Haberdashery, the also pick up Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a veteran of the Confederate army who claims that he is about to be sworn in as the new sheriff of Red Rock, which is the first of many claims from various characters that are possible lies.

Once they arrive at Minnie’s, where they plan to take shelter from an oncoming blizzard that is threatening to engulf them, they find that Minnie (Dana Gourrier) and her husband Sweet Dave (Gene Jones) are nowhere to be found and the place is being looked after by a large, hulking Mexican named Bob (Demián Bichir). Inside the haberdashery they find three other travelers who are taking shelter from the storm: Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth, in what would otherwise be the Christoph Waltz role), a shrilly eloquent Brit who claims that he is the hangman in Red Rock; Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), a surly cowboy who claims he is on his way home to visit his mother for Christmas; and General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), a surly Confederate general who still harbors more than a little resentment about losing the War of Northern Aggression. (If you’ve been counting, you will note that there are actually nine characters inside the haberdashery, but perhaps Tarantino doesn’t count O.B. among the “hateful” because he is a relatively benign character.)

And thus the stage is set for confrontation, which Tarantino draws out in a series of lengthy conversations, monologues, veiled and not-so-veiled threats, and escalating tensions that play off the various divisions in the room: the rule of law versus criminality, etiquette versus brutishness, and North versus South, which of course entails all manner of racial tensions that unfortunately still resonate with our world today. The fact that Major Warren is a black man in uniform with power unsettles both Mannix and General Smithers, while Warren harbors his own ethnic resentment toward Bob’s Mexican. Ruth is an equal opportunity offender simply because he doesn’t trust anyone and therefore assumes that every other person is an enemy, and Daisy is little more than vile, a leering snake just waiting to strike.

To discuss the plot much more would risk ruining what surprises Tarantino has in store, although one of the film’s biggest disappointments is that its various revelations don’t hold nearly the weight they are clearly intended to. When Mr. Orange unloaded his gun into Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, it was a genuinely shocking moment, the reverberations of which continued to unsettle the rest of the film. When Tarantino self-consciously rolls back time at one point to show someone poisoning the coffee, it sets up a mystery that has a relatively ho-hum payoff near the end of the film. Similarly, the explanation for what happened to Minnie and Sweet Dave and why the various travelers are waiting at the haberdashery feels little more than pro forma, especially when it becomes obvious that much of the film’s bloodshed is fundamentally unnecessary to the characters’ goals (plus it requires the arrival of Channing Tatum, who is woefully miscast).

Shock and awe are Tarantino’s bread and butter, but in The Hateful Eight it isn’t fully integrated into the overall flow of the story. This is never so evident as in the sequence in which Major Warren attempts to incite General Smithers by regaling everyone with the story of how he sexually humiliated and then killed Smithers’ son. The story may or may not be true, but Tarantino shows it to us anyway, an arguably unnecessary distraction from the intensity of Jackson’s and Dern’s performances. The idea of storytelling as a ruse is an integral part of Tarantino’s films, from the elaborate cover story concocted for Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs, to Christoph Waltz’s beguiling retelling of the Broomhilda myth in Django Unchained, but in The Hateful Eight it feels like little more than Tarantino playing a game of one-upmanship with himself, daring the audience to be offended.

It is not surprising, then, that the film had already met with numerous charges of misogyny and racism, which play right into Tarantino’s hands. In his better films, he uses and elaborates on exploitation tactics to challenge us to rethink the conventionally offensive, and he has always gone against expectation. Charges of misogyny are utterly misplaced, given that Tarantino has frequently employed memorable female protagonists, from Pam Grier’s eponymous character in Jackie Brown (1997), to the avenging female road warriors of Death Proof (2007), to Uma Thurman’s relentless Bride from the Kill Bill films (2004–2005). Charges of racism are similarly problematic, although even Tarantino’s most vocal defenders are surely tiring of his obsession with the n-word (his choice to make back-to-back Westerns with explicit racial elements naturally excuses this, at least on its face). If The Hateful Eight is truly guilty of anything, it isn’t racism or misogyny, but rather good ol’ fashioned misanthropy.

Tarantino has always operated in a universe of killers and rapists, drug dealers and arms dealers, slave owners and Jew hunters, but his films have always found some room for humanity, often embodied in a single character (interestingly, one who is frequently female). In The Hateful Eight, virtually everyone is as the title promises, which starts to suffocate our senses, especially after nearly three hours. Tarantino may feel like he’s just delivering what the title promises, but it weighs the film down, making it the least enjoyable entry in a body of work whose brilliance derives from Tarantino’s ability to deliver pleasure from the most unlikely of subjects.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Weinstein Company / Anchor Bay Entertainment