The Hateful Eight: 8 Reasons It's Quentin Tarantino's Best Film Since Pulp Fiction

7. It's Tonally Consistent

The worst thing that happened to Quentin Tarantino was the relative failure of Jackie Brown; it received solid reviews and made a tidy profit, but on the back of the medium-redefining Pulp Fiction it came across as a little tepid. Subsequently, his movies tended to stick to a tone more in-keeping with his intersecting crime anthology; B-Movie-aping pictures best described as being, well, pulpy. No matter what the movie was, it invariably featured some showy moments that pulled you out of the film even more than his cameos. Even Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, movies that should seemingly have been removed from all this by their period setting, had moments that dipped into that style; Samuel L. Jackson's monologue on the flammability of film in the former and the OTT action of the latter. It worked in Pulp Fiction because that was kinda the point, but in movies built on different ideas it felt a bit like pandering. Thankfully, possibly because Django showed there was a thirst for westerns, The Hateful Eight doesn't feature any of these out-of-place moments, instead striking a pretty consistent tone throughout - it sets out to be a violent western and that's exactly what it is. It's still very much a Tarantino film, infused with his usual tics and idiosyncrasies, but it's a Tarantino film with a clear tonal focus. That's not to say the other movies are bad for their off-kilter feel, it's just that The Hateful Eight feels more complete; any heightened violence or visual choices (the logo is a classic western as you can get) fit what he's going for here.