In his 9th feature film, the (arguably) most original living American filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino, has turned the last decade of the 1960s Hollywood upside on his head. A loose adaptation on the Charles Manson infamous 1969 murders of actress (and wife of then Roman Polanski) Sharon Tate (played by Australian Margot Robbie), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood... mixes real people of the time with a touch of Tarantino-esque fiction (the sort he used in 2009's Inglorious Basterds, but to a much more effective result) to give us a movie that is epic in length but short on bravura excitement that the director's best works are usually known for.
As Rick Dalton, the soon-to-be-over-the-hill star of a famous 1950s Western TV show, Bounty Law, Leonardo DiCaprio does some of his best acting, portraying the frustrated actor with just the right touch of self-aware decline, alcohol abuse and anger. It's unfortunate, however, that he inhabits a film so absent of plot. Many scenes feel absolutely pointless: Tate watching her own movie in a theatre while dangling her feet on the seat in front of her; Dalton having a heart-to-heart about life with a young female co-star; and the most superfluous of all was the long set-up (minus any payoff): Dalton's stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) asking to see an old acquaintance on a Los Angeles ranch occupied by strange hippies. Tarantino masterfully builds the tension, infusing it with foreshadowing of potential bloodshed, only to deliver us a ... flat tire (a metaphor for the entire film, I suspect).
By the time Hollywood... reaches its blood-filled (anti?) climax, most audiences are bound to be left with a similar thought: "Uhm, was that it?" The movie, sadly, never amounts to anything more than several scenes that feel as excerpts from a TV show of which no one's seen a single episode. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood... is Tarantino as his absolute laziest: a movie that is homage to his own infatuation of a Hollywood era he worshipped as a child, but without a single thought to his audience's patience, for not every fantasy is worthy of 165 minutes of blah blah.
C-
