Stranded by a blizzard in the wilds of post-Civil War Wyoming, a posse of Quentin Tarantino alumni convenes at a remote cabin for a murderous reunion party. They're an impressive bunch — weathered, whiskered and heavily armed — but their master's wit seems to have abandoned them to their fates, like it stepped out into the snowstorm and never came back.
"The Hateful Eight" is a surprisingly limp effort from one of modern cinema's most accomplished auteurs. The masterful wordsmith who once moonlighted as a Hollywood script doctor has refined his directorial craft at the expense of his screenwriting. Tarantino's films have always been talkative, but it's hard to remember them ever feeling this long-winded, or yielding so little.
While transporting a fugitive to Red Rock for a date with the hangman, veteran bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) reluctantly agrees to share his stagecoach with two men whom he encounters on the road. One is a fellow bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) with a few corpses in tow; the other is a former Confederate guerrilla (Walton Goggins) who claims to have been appointed as the new sheriff of Red Rock.