With the 2015 western The Hateful Eight, writer-director Quentin Tarantino made a conscious return to a story he had explored before: What happens when you put a handful of violent characters all in the same room for the duration of a whole movie? The film was a reflection of what he had done with 1992’s Reservoir Dogs (his first true feature film if we don’t count My Best Friend’s Birthday), and after courting the biggest box-office success of his career with 2012’s Django Unchained, Tarantino was practically playing the hits with The Hateful Eight.
Taking place shortly after the Civil War, it followed eight (or so) characters who are trapped together at Minnie’s Haberdashery during a snowstorm. But it’s the storm brewing inside that features some of Tarantino’s favorite themes: racial prejudice, redemption, revenge, pretending, and a whole lot of talking.
While it all added up to one of Tarantino’s worst movies, The Hateful Eight still proves to be a worthwhile watch because of its well-played characters. Most of the cast spends the movie sitting around waiting for the action to start, but there are two exceptions who give the director some of his most vivid characters: Samuel L. Jackson playing Marquis Warren, a Black Union major turned bounty hunter, and Walton Goggins playing Chris Mannix, a cruel and racist white sheriff (who might be lying about that title). Goggins, in particular, gives one of his greatest performances as Mannix, using his stringy physicality and musical diction to bring Tarantino’s bleakest dialogue to life. It’s a performance so good that it almost makes the movie work all by itself.
‘The Hateful Eight’ Worked Wonders Pairing Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins Together
The Hateful Eight is one of Quentin Tarantino’s most brutally nihilistic movies. It runs nearly three hours (so long it works better as a miniseries) and lacks the romance of Django Unchained, the ass-kicking heart of Kill Bill, and the clockwork suspense of World War II classic Inglourious Basterds. Instead, it likes to linger in the muck with its characters, all of whom are varying degrees of dirtbag, both the ones with secrets and the ones who claim to be on the side of justice. We’re slowly introduced to its cast, which also includes John “the Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his charge Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are on a stagecoach making its way to the town of Red Rock before being rerouted to the haberdashery. They eventually arrive, but not before the relationships have been established and re-established with some of Tarantino’s clunkiest exposition.
What makes Jackson and Goggins’ performances in The Hateful Eight so electric is their ability to make Tarantino’s exposition roll off the tongue. Tarantino claimed to The Hollywood Reporter that Jackson is one of the few actors he lets play around with his elaborate dialogue, and he gives Warren what so much of the movie lacks: genuine mystery. Goggins, meanwhile, told the Nashville Scene that he read the script “250, 300 times” to get to a level of understanding where he could make the character fully work. He breathes life into Mannix’s shameful Lost Cause beliefs, turning the character’s racial insecurity into something knowingly pathetic (as opposed to the cartoonish racists of most of Tarantino’s filmography). He’s a live wire, and if Warren is the movie’s most enigmatic character, Mannix is its most vulnerable and open. Everybody else seems to have something to hide.
Walton Goggins Gives ‘The Hateful Eight’ a Sense of Life
The Hateful Eight’s most intriguing theme involves the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War and its effects on the inhabitants at Minnie’s. Warren, the only Black member of the cast, is naturally guarded and suspicious in that context, keenly aware of his status in the others’ eyes. But Mannix feels a certain freedom, and Walton Goggins embodies that with a reckless body language and singsong way of speaking that elevates the familiar Tarantino dialogue. After his memorable supporting villain turn as Billy Crash in Django Unchained, Goggins must have caught Tarantino’s eye as the best actor to embody the evils of the antebellum South. And the 300 times Goggins read the script paid off beautifully in his ability to turn phrases like “you’ve got a letter from Abraham Lincoln” into unforgettably venomous lines.
While both Mannix and Warren are at odds throughout the movie, they’re also natural allies as the plot kicks into gear and the conspiracies they’ve walked in on are unveiled. The sheer sight of Goggins, one of our most underappreciated character actors, going toe to toe with a Tarantino regular like Jackson, almost makes the movie worthwhile. The Hateful Eight’s greatest problems are in Tarantino’s unengaging mystery structure and the fact that too many of its many characters feel like prop guns waiting to go off (whether in violence or really long monologues). This leads to a movie that looks and feels like a chamber play but without the live energy that can make theater truly exciting. You’re unlikely to find it on a list of the most exciting Westerns. But Goggins — unpredictable, nervous, and scheming — nearly gets it to that level all by himself.
