There are a lot of reasons why a film can be lousy. Perhaps the worst one is laziness. “The Con is On” (2018) is a limited-release bomb of a caper flick. The caper stinks (stolen loot, a psychopathic Russian, a big jewel, whatever). Uma Thurman looks spectacular and gives the impression of effort as a con artist with a checkered past, but her husband is Tim Roth doing a half-assed Dudley Moore impersonation. Crispin Glover plays himself as a bipolar director. Everyone else sucks and is not worth mentioning, except Parker Posey, who is horrific as a whacked-out movie flunky.
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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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