Back in 1981, Brian De Palma was right in the middle of his run as The Next Hitchcock and John Travolta was close to peak stardom. They teamed up for a classic that mixes murder mystery, political conspiracy and a look behind the scenes of low-budget filmmaking. The camerawork goes for a lot of home run shots (but swings and misses sometimes). We get introduced to John Lithgow and Dennis Franz. What’s not to like? “Blow Out” was one of the first movies that made me understand how much I loved good movies (and curly redheads – thank you, Nancy Allen).
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Why is it I’m so happy “The Commuter” (2018) didn’t suck? Because I was afraid it’d be a lame, Taken-on-a-train knockoff? It kinda was (family in jeopardy, cellphones, ugh), but it also incorporated Hitchcock, “Duel” and every other halfway decent action movie involving trains. And the Noo Yawk accents were good enough. And I’ll overlook small violations of the laws of train physics and the Action Movie Concussion Protocol. Because when everything’s seemingly either a sucky sequel, sucky comic book movie, sucky horror movie, or combination of the above, there’s something nice about a slightly-above-average Liam Neeson movie. Noble, even.
For the first half of “The Hateful Eight” (2015) (BTW, I counted nine relatively hateful main characters, but anyway…), there is surprisingly little violence. There is, however, a scene in which bounty hunter Kurt Russell expresses concern that a duplicitous co-conspirator will get jumpy and reveal themselves. The jumpy one turns out to be Quentin Tarantino, who could no longer hold back his violent instincts and unleashes a torrent of blood that drowns what had been a downright Hitchcockian Western mystery. I’m not stupid. I know Tarantino deals in the visceral. But there’s usually a payoff. Here, not so much.
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