Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, The Hateful Eight, focuses on a small posse of bandits who spend most of the film shut away in a room, revolvers and repartees at the ready, trying to figure out who’s on whose side. Punctuating the profanity and pistol-fire are enough tall tales to keep everyone’s trust to a minimum, and there’s no doubt that by the time the credits roll an assortment of characters will be lying in a pool of their own blood.

If that description rings a bell, so it should: the symmetry between Tarantino’s latest movie and his 1992 debut, Reservoir Dogs, is clear. But rather than signifying a return to the stripped-down fare with which he burst on to the scene, The Hateful Eight demonstrates just how far the director has now departed from his early masterworks.

If Reservoir Dogs was the cinematic equivalent of a featherweight boxer, The Hateful Eight resembles a retired sumo wrestler. Tarantino has dispensed with the claustrophobic, quickfire intensity of his debut in favour of a feature-length homage to his own niche obsessions. The Seinfeldian celebration of trivial nonsense that lit up his early scripts is gone, in its place a string of protracted, self-consciously tense back-and-forths, most of which equate to poor imitations of Inglourious Basterds’ much-lauded opening sequence.

One person’s drawn-out reference-fest is another’s “vast American epic” of course, but there is something broader to be said for Tarantino’s transition from straight-faced film-maker to goofy meta-merchant. (The dividing line sits at the turn of the millennium, separating Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown from both Kill Bill films, Death Proof, Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight).

Whereas his early films were set in something resembling reality, his recent stuff takes place in a self-referential schlock-world governed by the conventions of long-extinct genres. His inner movie nerd has started directing the action rather than decorating it. The glowing briefcase which drives Pulp Fiction’s plot is as clear a salute to the Hitchcockian MacGuffin as you’ll see, and the Mexican standoff of Reservoir Dogs’ final scene was a subtle thumbs-up to Sergio Leone. Jackie Brown, with its close ties to 70s blaxploitation movies and 40s film noir, showed that Tarantino is able to pay tribute to a genre without descending into grinning pastiche.

Those nods to genre were subtle. These days, though, the only way is excess. Like Django Unchained and Kill Bill before it, The Hateful Eight is a Frankenstein’s monster pieced together from the twitching limbs of the blaxploitation picture, the samurai film, the spaghetti western. And as is customary with Phase-Two Tarantino, there are no characters, only “characters” – cartoonish caricatures painted with the broadest of brushstrokes and performed with a maximum of self-awareness.

This new blueprint leaves plenty of room for claret-coloured fun, but with such levels of absurdity demanding little in the way of emotional investment, the enjoyment remains superficial. The Hateful Eight brings a barrage of backstabbing, but each revelation is delivered with a knowing wink. The film’s bark is never matched by its bite.

Divisiveness is not something Tarantino is about to shy away from – and there’s a lot to be said for a film-maker who avoids the middle of the road as vehemently as he does. The fact that his movies are always something of a cinephile’s paradise means the director and critics are likely to continue along the sort of mutually appreciative relationship that Harvey Keitel’s Wolf so discouraged in Pulp Fiction.

For the rest of us, the line between exuberance and self-indulgence is a lot thinner, and the overriding tone of his recent films is not tension or momentum, but self-satisfaction. And as a wise man once said: “Pride only hurts, it never helps.”