'Hateful Eight': Tarantino's most indulgent film (for better or worse)

I have sometimes likened Quentin Tarantino to Kanye West. They are both undeniably talented, but also so convinced of their own genius and insecure about it -- that they are always declaring their own work a masterpiece -- literally and figuratively.

If you want to continue the Kanye comparison I would call The Hateful Eight Tarantino's Yeezus. It's his most aggressively indulgent and uncommercial film in years and it will likely be his most divisive.

As a pretty diehard Tarantino fan I am not entirely sure how I feel about it.

It's all of Tarantino's obsessions dialed up to 11, and although he claims he plans to make two more films before he retires it seems as if he wanted to leave everything out on the field with this one.

Now the version I saw was just over three hours with an intermission, so I'm not sure if what I saw will be what mainstream audiences will eventually see. Even with cuts, this is far more extreme stuff than Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.

And I'm not entirely sure that is a good thing. The first half of this film may bore some audiences to tears. Tarantino is his own dialogue's biggest fan and in the long early set up of this movie he really revels in his own use of language, for better or worse. In the second half the movie descends into an uncompromising gore fest with very pronounced homages to the work of Brian De Palma.

But while Tarantino's previous two films were about larger subjects and seemed to have larger themes, this film feels more like an exercise in style and excess. There definitely is some racial commentary in there but it's muddled at best by the chaotic nature of the film.

The Hateful Eight

Speaking of race, this is the first Tarantino film where the use of the N-word bothered me. It feels like an act of defiance here that feels entitled and hostile. I don't care if the word is used in the proper context but this was the first time I found myself wondering if Tarantino has a complex. I didn't care for his forcing Zoe Bell into the narrative either.

Still, there's a lot to love about this movie.

The performances are pretty much uniformly excellent, albeit over-the-top. Ennio Morricone's score is a throwback classic. And the movie looks phenomenal. There are sequences that rank among some of Tarantino's best if nothing else because of their sheer audacity, but this is definitely the first film of his I've seen that I didn't instantly love.

That said, I didn't love Yeezus on first listen either. I thought the rave reviews were overstated and that Kanye had burrowed too deep into his own sense of self importance. But now when "Black Skinhead" comes on I bob my head. I could see myself warming up to The Hateful Eight easily after a second viewing but right now I'm on the fence.