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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Quibbles with The Hateful Eight (with Spoilers)

I raved on about The Hateful Eight the other day - the eighth movie of Quentin Tarantino, and I'd say second only in excellence to his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, which in my book is high praise indeed. But I did say in that review that I saw a plot hole or two, and there were a couple of scenes I wasn't thrilled about, so I thought I'd list them here, with a spoiler warning ...

SPOILERS follow ...

I probably missed these two points, because I was so engrossed in the plot, if that makes any sense, but -

1.  How did Walter Goggins' character (Chris Mannix) know so quickly and certainly that Samuel L. Jackson's (Major Warren) letter from Abraham Lincoln was a phony?   This just seemed a little odd, especially after Kurt Russell's hardbitten John Ruth seemed so sure it was real.   Was it just so obvious that the letter couldn't be real - but if so, what was Ruth's problem in not seeing that?

2.  Similarly, how did Warren know at the end that Michael Madsen's Joe Gage was the poisoner, and not Tim Roth's Oswaldo Mobray?  I have a feeling I missed something there, but on the other hand, I can't recall when Gage rather Mobray was revealed by his own hand.

And here are two scenes I could have lived without into this otherwise superbly rendered movie -

1. Actually, a few scenes without blood or bruises on Daisy's (Jennifer Jason Leigh's) face would have been nice.   The blood and bruises became a little tedious.

2.  And I would have been fine with the schlang-sucking scene (that's right Trump, don't pretend you don't know what that means) being a little less explicit.   And, actually, I thought the whole General Smithers' (Bruce Dern) thread was superfluous to the overall narrative, much as I thought Dern put in a commanding performance as always (as did everyone else in the movie).

But these are small quibbles indeed, considering how good the rest of the movie is.   Here, again, is my full review, for more of that.




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