10 Worst Opening Scenes In Otherwise Perfect Movies

Quentin Tarantino's latest picture, The Hateful Eight, a sort of western version of his debut classic Reservoir Dogs, contains some of the acclaimed auteur's best characters and sequences to date; it's a bloody murder mystery made especially for cinephiles and it gifted fans with a relentlessly enjoyable ride from start to finish.

Well, almost from start to finish - once the damn thing actually decides to get going, that is.

Because as great as The Hateful Eight is, its opening chapter, "Last Stage to Red Rock" (and the subsequent chapter, to be perfectly honest), drag on to the point where you're checking your watch, wondering whether the first forty minutes of The Hateful Eight really does involve a bunch of people chatting in a stagecoach out in the snow and nothing else.

And really, it does. It's not that these scenes set in the vast snowy terrain completely stink, of course; this is Tarantino we're talking about, and who doesn't relish the chance to see Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell and Walter Goggins dispensing the writer/director's trademark dialogue? But this scene goes on for a long, long time, to the point where it feels like the characters are just talking in circles.

There aren't even any cool cutaways to spice things up, as has been the case in other Tarantino films. The first two chapters are just incredibly samey, and it isn't until we arrive at Minnie's Haberdashery that things really get interesting. I get it: characterisation is important, but the first forty minutes of The Hateful Eight are indulgent as hell.