Movie Review: The Hateful Eight.

 Ordinarily, Quentin Tarantino films are kind of a big deal.

 In the crowded and mercurial firmament of Hollywood, Tarantino is that rarest of things, an old-fashioned star director; a man behind the camera whose name is recognised by the public at large.

 Unfortunately, this year Tarantino came something of a cropper when his new release, "The Hateful Eight," was pitted against a new film with Harrison Ford in it. And Carrie Fisher. And The Force.

 Utterly eclipsed by the goings on in a galaxy far, far away, the best chance The Hateful Eight had was of finding movie nerds who were sick of the hype surrounding Star Wars and therefore willing to watch something else.

 Ladies and gentlemen, I am that nerd. So what did I think of The Hateful Eight?

 Well, every generation a rumour re-surfaces that a well-known celebrity had their ribs surgically removed in order to better fellate themselves. Based on the new movie, I think Quentin Tarantino may have had that surgery.

 It's not just that Quentin Tarantino loves his own work, or that his films are getting progressively longer - Hateful Eight being his longest to date. It's that as his work gets more bloated and less interesting - as he becomes psychologically what Brando became physically - he seems to think he's making films that tackle Big Issues.

 Specifically, in The Hateful Eight, Tarantino is returning to the theme of race. Some time after the American Civil War, bounty hunter John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) is taking female outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Lee) to be hanged when he runs into fellow bounty hunter Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black civil war veteran. Beset by a storm, they take refuge in a small general store a few miles from civilisation where the occupants (a motley crew of other Tarantino regulars) seem to be hiding something.

 So far, so trashy, but instead of making the film we would all hope for from this set-up - a tight, smart, locked-room mystery - we have a lot of clumsy material on race politics that boils down to Samuel L. Jackson being called a nigger repeatedly, usually by people who are very clear on the fact that they don't like or trust niggers.

 It's uncomrfotable, but also done so much that it becomes slightly wearying.

 Aside from the racism, there's also a hugely misjudged amount of misogyny. We're introduced to Jennifer Jason Leigh's character as someone who is wanted by the law and destined to hang, but we're never shown anything to help us understand why she's so supposedly evil. Instead, she is repeatedly beaten up by macho archetypes whilst shackled and defenseless. The general physical abuse of Daisy Domergue, combined with her ill-judged comedy name, feels gratuitous and mean spirited. Sure, she's clearly a criminal, but in the morally bankrupt Tarantinoverse there's no reason why an audience would inherently root against that.

 This same moral bankruptcy - or perhaps, if we're honest, a lack of depth in any of the characters - means that it's hard to care about the typically high bodycount or the attempted moral lesson in progress, whatever that might be. Tarantino has said that America needs to have a conversation with itself about racism, and indeed it does, but he himself should never be the man to chair the debate. This is, after all, a man who decided to retcon World War II so that Hitler was machine-gunned to death by the director of "Hostel." Tarantino should be fun and camp and exciting, not attempting serious allegories of racial tension in post-millenial America. The best that Tarantino can do for racial division in the United States is, ironically, to keep making ham-fisted movies on the subject until others get so irritated they step in and make better films just to shut him up.

 All of this aside, is the rest of the film any good?

 The cast are all on form, largely a result of being decent actors. Walton Goggins, especially, does sterling work. The plot is over-long and at one point, Tarantino himself interjects at random to narrate events in possibly the laziest piece of writing this side of me asking myself if the rest of the film was any good, just now.

 The central mystery of the film never feels particularly compelling and isn't solved in a clever way, and there's a glaring plot hole for any mystery - one character has concrete evidence that another character is an impostor, but doesn't bring it up until half the cast are already dead.

 The soundtrack, by "fuck-me-is-he-still-alive?!" Ennio Morricone is largely, in fact, stolen from other Morricone-scored movies, most notably "The Thing," which Tarantino has somewhat bafflingly claimed this movie is an homage to, and was, according to IMDb trivia, the only film he showed to the cast and crew for guidance.

 Let that sink in for a minute; Tarantino has disappeared so far up his own infallible arse that he's been explaining to Kurt Russell how to make The Thing.

 The Hateful Eight is overall a just-okay movie, too long and nowhere near as funny, clever or entertaining as it thinks it is. For a film which had its script leaked and suffered extensive re-writes, it still feels oddly rushed and unfinished.

 Most importantly, it's a film that is nowhere near as mature as it aims to be. If studios wanted to release a film that would draw a more adult audience than Star Wars, they've entirely backed the wrong horse opera. Tarantino movies, in spite of the gore and claims of grown-up themes, are made by and for twelve-year-old boy in all of us. The sooner we all remember that, the sooner we'll start seeing decent Tarantino again. Based on this evidence, we shouldn't hold our breath.