If you’re interested in seeing a film where a woman gets punched in the face within the first five minutes, and the only thing more prominent than the N-word is blood, look no further than “The Hateful Eight,” the latest genre-exercise from the stunted brain of Quentin Tarantino. The film wants to tell you that it has a progressive agenda, and that it “distills the disquieting polarization of a country that has given us Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter,” per the Los Angeles Times. But “The Hateful Eight” actually has the racial politics of a privileged teenager with Coca-Cola breath.Add to that the unnecessary violence toward women.Set in the period of the post-Civil War, the film revolves around the capture of Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a fugitive who is being transported to a place called Red Rock by a bounty hunter named John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell). She is wanted dead or alive, but, as his name implies, Ruth is keeping her chained to his wrist so he can deliver her and watch her be hanged.Riding their stagecoach through the snow, Ruth and Domergue stumble upon two men. The first is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), another bounty hunter who is attempting to transport his own captured bodies to Red Rock. Warren and Ruth know each other but at least at first, are weary of the others’ motives. Warren hitches a ride and Domergue, practically foaming at the mouth, takes the opportunity to berate the two and, as previously mentioned, gets punch in the face repeatedly as a result. Later, they pick up Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who is also on his way to Red Rock, where he claims he is to be sworn in as the new sheriff.The four characters, on their way to Red Rock, stop off at Minnie's Haberdashery, where they plan to wait out the blizzard. When they arrive, Minnie, the owner, is nowhere to be found. But they discover four men — a mumbly guy named “The Mexican” (Demián Bichir); Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), who claims to be the hangman at Red Rock; the quiet cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen); and General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). The rest of the action takes place in this one-room stopover shop, where a cat-and-mouse game ensues and everybody’s agendas and identities are called into question, with increasing intensity, vitriol, and violence.When writing about a movie like “The Hateful Eight,” there are different things to take into account. You have to be ready to be accused of defending political-correctness or the conversation-stopper, “You just don’t get it.” But there is nothing to get, and that is the problem. I’m not one to advocate for less violence in movies, or less of anything, really, except half-baked ideas. The question that should be asked, but is not, is what does this film really have to say about race? Tarantino marching against police brutality is admirable, but it says nothing about “The Hateful Eight.” The filmmaker has one black actor in his film, and lets every other character berate him with hate speech — but that simply says that racism exists. Allowing the character to make it to the end, but having him go through an unusual amount of punishment to get there, is misguided.“The Hateful Eight” will be polarizing, but only in the way that a trolling think piece is polarizing. The film will get an abundance of publicity and there will surely be critics who write lengthy defenses of it and the filmmaker. This is the nature of the Hollywood machine. There are so many less publicized films out there are much more interesting and deserving of attention in every way.
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