This movie is bullshit. Boring, meandering, self-indulgent bullshit. I am a huge fan of Tarantino’s movies. Reservoir Dogs and From Dusk till Dawn are among my favorite movies of all time and most of his other work is damn solid. I had The Hateful Eight as the best movie of 2015. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the first Tarantino movie that I have genuinely hated. This is what happens when a filmmaker gets his head so deeply stuck up his own ass that nobody can reach him. This is what happens when a filmmaker that based his career off his adoration of directors like Lucio Fulci and Sergio Leone starts to refer to himself as an artist and auteur. This is hipster bullshit Tarantino and, folks, I hate hipsters.
Set in Hollywood in 1969 against the backdrop of the Manson murders, this movie has no plot. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a washed-up Western star and Brad Pitt plays his stunt double that, for some reason, also drives him around and is constantly with him. Margot Robbie also stars as Sharon Tate, the famous actress that would ultimately be killed by the Manson family. There are also guest spots, basically cameos, by other famous actors including Al Pacino and Kurt Russel. There is no point to any of them and these are actors that should know better than this, I don’t care whose name is on the script.
I started watching this movie, this 2 hour and 40-minute trainwreck of a movie, with three friends. By the end, only one was left. The other two left about halfway through when they abandoned all hope that the film would develop a plot. There is no fucking story in this film. None. It is a loosely connected (and fucking long) series of scenes containing these characters, none of which amounts to a plot, an arc, nothing. You could randomly remove scenes from this film and it wouldn’t inhibit your ability to follow it because there is nothing to follow. Hell, you could watch the scenes out of order and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. You can’t tell when the film is mercifully approaching its end because there are no plot threads to finish up. It is like a film experiment in stream of consciousness and, if that sounds appealing, then you might just be the kind of hipster jackass that this movie is meant for.
Perhaps you could argue that Tarantino’s work has always relied more heavily on style and character than on plot. There is some merit to that argument. But his other films had a fucking plot. I’m not even going to give points for performances here because, I mean seriously, look at the fucking cast. Of course, the performances are strong. But the characters just aren’t worth it. Robbie is particularly wasted as Tate as there is really no reason for her to even be in the film. If you are going to include a real-life tragic figure in a movie, there better be some point to it. She needs some sort of character arc or something. She can’t just be a hot girl that shares the name of such a figure. The role here is so uninvolved and inconsequential that there is never any sense of foreboding or impending doom with her character, nor is the audience given any particular reason to care. The real-life murder of a pregnant woman should not be used as a mere prop.
DiCaprio’s character is also, um, questionable. As the main character, we are expected to sympathize with his plight as an actor that has passed his prime…..but then we are told why he is having such a hard time getting work. He can’t get hired anymore because he beat up a woman and, consequently, nobody wants to work with him. Our hero, everybody. Look, I’m not a politically correct guy. If you tell me whatever social justice warrior bullshit you are championing or what offends you this week, I’ll tell you to fuck yourself after you finishing crying about it. But you know what? Beating women is wrong. That is not a political sentiment, that should not be a divisive statement, that is something that all decent human beings can agree on. I didn’t need some hashtag to tell me that it’s wrong and it is not a modern issue. You can’t build an empathetic character that way. I don’t want to talk about Tarantino’s relationship with Weinstein or #metoo or anything. That is shitty writing in any era and how the fuck anybody could think that it would work in this era is beyond me.
The only character that works is Brad Pitt’s stuntman. In fact, the only great scene in this movie is a hilariously brutal fight scene between Pitt and the Manson family. If this movie was 90 minutes long, I could recommend it purely on the strength of this one scene. But it’s not. It’s 2 hours and 40 minutes long and that scene comes well over two hours into the movie. That scene is a microcosm of what this movie should have been: Brad Pitt vs. the Manson family. I think that is the movie that a younger Tarantino would have made and it would have been glorious.
Tarantino keeps threatening (or maybe promising) to retire, and he can’t go out like this. No director has a perfect track record, but he has become so obsessed with style that he has lost sight of the fact that style only works when paired with story and character. My hope is that enough critics can stop sucking his dick long enough to knock him down a couple of pegs. This is not the worst film that I have seen this year, but it is easily the most disappointing.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Hollywood#/media/File:Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Hollywood_poster.png
