Quentin Tarantino's Worst Film Still Manages To Deliver a Stellar Walton Goggins Performance
Anthony Crislip has always loved movies and television, and has been published in outlets such as SlashFilm and Ultimate Classic Rock. While working as a film programmer or judge at a film festival, he has striven to develop interest in underseen films. He is a particular fan of digging deep into forgotten corners of film history.
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With the 2015 western The Hateful Eight, writer-director Quentin Tarantino made a conscious return to a story he had explored before: What happens when you put a handful of violent characters all in the same room for the duration of a whole movie? The film was a reflection of what he had done with 1992's Reservoir Dogs (his first true feature film if we don't count My Best Friend’s Birthday), and after courting the biggest box-office success of his career with 2012’s Django Unchained, Tarantino was practically playing the hits with The Hateful Eight.
Taking place shortly after the Civil War, it followed eight (or so) characters who are trapped together at Minnie’s Haberdashery during a snowstorm. But it's the storm brewing inside that features some of Tarantino’s favorite themes: racial prejudice, redemption, revenge, pretending, and a whole lot of talking.
While it all added up to one of Tarantino’s worst movies, The Hateful Eight still proves to be a worthwhile watch because of its well-played characters. Most of the cast spends the movie sitting around waiting for the action to start, but there are two exceptions who give the director some of his most vivid characters: Samuel L. Jackson playing Marquis Warren, a Black Union major turned bounty hunter, and Walton Goggins playing Chris Mannix, a cruel and racist white sheriff (who might be lying about that title). Goggins, in particular, gives one of his greatest performances as Mannix, using his stringy physicality and musical diction to bring Tarantino’s bleakest dialogue to life. It’s a performance so good that it almost makes the movie work all by itself.
'The Hateful Eight' Worked Wonders Pairing Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins Together
The Hateful Eight is one of Quentin Tarantino’s most brutally nihilistic movies. It runs nearly three hours (so long it works better as a miniseries) and lacks the romance of Django Unchained, the ass-kicking heart of Kill Bill, and the clockwork suspense of World War II classic Inglourious Basterds. Instead, it likes to linger in the muck with its characters, all of whom are varying degrees of dirtbag, both the ones with secrets and the ones who claim to be on the side of justice. We’re slowly introduced to its cast, which also includes John “the Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his charge Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are on a stagecoach making its way to the town of Red Rock before being rerouted to the haberdashery. They eventually arrive, but not before the relationships have been established and re-established with some of Tarantino’s clunkiest exposition.
What makes Jackson and Goggins’ performances in The Hateful Eight so electric is their ability to make Tarantino’s exposition roll off the tongue. Tarantino claimed to The Hollywood Reporter that Jackson is one of the few actors he lets play around with his elaborate dialogue, and he gives Warren what so much of the movie lacks: genuine mystery. Goggins, meanwhile, told the Nashville Scene that he read the script “250, 300 times” to get to a level of understanding where he could make the character fully work. He breathes life into Mannix’s shameful Lost Cause beliefs, turning the character’s racial insecurity into something knowingly pathetic (as opposed to the cartoonish racists of most of Tarantino’s filmography). He’s a live wire, and if Warren is the movie’s most enigmatic character, Mannix is its most vulnerable and open. Everybody else seems to have something to hide.
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Case File 0481 · Open
Collider/ Movies/ Mystery/ Which Classic Mystery Movie Are You
8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Classic Mystery Movie Are You? Every answer counts toward the verdict.
Four films that solve a mystery four completely different ways, from a comedy with three separate endings to a thriller told backwards. One of them has been describing you all along.
The Suspects01🕯Clue1985
02🪟Rear Window1954
03📦Se7en1995
04📸Memento2000
Prime suspect
Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 01 of 08Film Night
What kind of film night are you after? Pick the one that sounds most like you
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 02 of 08Character Witness
How would your friends describe you? Be honest
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 03 of 08Whereabouts
What do you do when you are stuck at home? One answer only
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 04 of 08The Twist
How do you react to a plot twist? Pick the closest answer
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 05 of 08The Scene
Pick a room. No wrong answers here
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 06 of 08Testimony
What is your memory like? Pick the closest answer
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 07 of 08Closing Argument
How do you feel about endings? Think about the last film that got you
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Evidence logged automaticallyExhibit 08 of 08The Verdict
What should a mystery film do to you? Last one
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Case Closed Verdict Your Mystery Movie Is
🕯 Clue Jonathan Lynn · 1985 You are the most fun thing in the room, and you are not remotely in control of it.
Clue is a murder mystery built from a board game, played at farce speed by one of the best comic ensembles ever assembled, and it refuses to commit to a single answer. That is you: loud, quick, impossible to plan around, and the reason anybody had a good time. Case Notes
- You keep the energy up and the plan loose, and people have a much better evening because of it.
- Three different endings were sent to different cinemas in 1985, so the answer depended on which screen you walked into.
- It flopped completely, found its audience on video, and went back into cinemas for its fortieth anniversary with the endings randomised again.
- Your flaw is that chaos is excellent company and a terrible plan.
Chaotic Quick Sociable Unserious
🪟 Rear Window Alfred Hitchcock · 1954 You watch, and you notice the thing everybody else walks past.
Hitchcock trapped James Stewart in one room with a broken leg and a view of his neighbours, and built an entire thriller out of a man looking out of a window and being right. You are the one who clocks the detail nobody announced, and you are usually correct before you can prove it. Case Notes
- You are quietly the most observant person in your circle and you notice changes before anybody mentions them.
- The courtyard was one of the largest sets ever built at Paramount, with thirty-one apartments and working plumbing.
- It was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Director and is still taught as the cleanest thriller ever constructed.
- Your risk is that watching and doing something about it are not the same, and you know it.
Observant Patient Curious Detached
📦 Se7en David Fincher · 1995 You take things on, and you do not put them down.
Fincher made a serial killer film where the detectives are losing the entire time, shot it so dark the studio complained, and refused to change an ending that everybody told him would sink the film. You have that same refusal in you, and it has cost you more than you let on. Case Notes
- You are the one who keeps going after everybody else has accepted it cannot be solved.
- New Line wanted a different ending and Brad Pitt reportedly refused to make the film without the one they shot.
- It turned Fincher from the director who had a bad time on Alien 3 into the defining thriller director of his generation.
- Your weakness is that carrying something this long does real damage, and you are usually the last to notice.
Relentless Serious Principled Haunted
📸 Memento Christopher Nolan · 2000 Nobody can quite follow your thinking, and you get there anyway.
Nolan told the story backwards, so the audience knows as little as the man at the centre of it does, and the whole film becomes an argument about how much of what you believe you simply decided to believe. You arrive at the right answer by a route nobody else would have taken. Case Notes
- You work things out sideways, and explaining the route takes longer than the answer did.
- It was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing in 2002 and won neither, which still annoys people.
- It cost around nine million dollars, made over five times that, and built the career that led to everything after.
- Your flaw is trusting your own version of events slightly more than the evidence supports.
Lateral Private Analytical Unreadable
Evidence Log
Clue
Rear Window
Se7en
Memento
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Walton Goggins Gives 'The Hateful Eight' a Sense of Life
The Hateful Eight’s most intriguing theme involves the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War and its effects on the inhabitants at Minnie’s. Warren, the only Black member of the cast, is naturally guarded and suspicious in that context, keenly aware of his status in the others’ eyes. But Mannix feels a certain freedom, and Walton Goggins embodies that with a reckless body language and singsong way of speaking that elevates the familiar Tarantino dialogue. After his memorable supporting villain turn as Billy Crash in Django Unchained, Goggins must have caught Tarantino's eye as the best actor to embody the evils of the antebellum South. And the 300 times Goggins read the script paid off beautifully in his ability to turn phrases like “you’ve got a letter from Abraham Lincoln” into unforgettably venomous lines.
While both Mannix and Warren are at odds throughout the movie, they’re also natural allies as the plot kicks into gear and the conspiracies they’ve walked in on are unveiled. The sheer sight of Goggins, one of our most underappreciated character actors, going toe to toe with a Tarantino regular like Jackson, almost makes the movie worthwhile. The Hateful Eight’s greatest problems are in Tarantino’s unengaging mystery structure and the fact that too many of its many characters feel like prop guns waiting to go off (whether in violence or really long monologues). This leads to a movie that looks and feels like a chamber play but without the live energy that can make theater truly exciting. You're unlikely to find it on a list of the most exciting Westerns. But Goggins — unpredictable, nervous, and scheming — nearly gets it to that level all by himself.
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