+ Most Overrated Movie of the Year
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| Major stars and exotic, palm tree-laced Hollywood lures from this irresistible poster for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood |
Hollywood, 1969: Western TV-show veteran Rick Dalton is an alcoholic struggling to stay relevant, and with the help of his loyal stuntman friend Cliff, he takes up an Italian venture, while new neighbors come with trouble...
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is actually the 11th feature from Tennessean master writer/director Quentin Tarantino (My Best Friend's Birthday (1987)), - although it is marketed as his 9th), perhaps because he has stipulated that he will only make 10, and that he isn't quite done yet. (It can come to 9 if you don't count his first, little-seen debut My Best Friend's Birthday and also count his Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 as one film, which is obviously untrue.)
The film arrives with high hopes, not least because it teams up two of the world's biggest stars; Leonardo DiCaprio (Gangs of New York (2002)), who previously starred in Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), and Brad Pitt (Johnny Suede (1991)), who joins a Tarantino film for the first time here. But also because it is a Hollywood-themed movie, which seems appropriate for self-professed movie maniac and pop culture reference artist par excellence Tarantino.
And yet Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a massive disappointment.
The film entertains, - and anything less would have been wildly scandalous, - but it does so leaving a bitter aftertaste, before it ends in a climax that is ludicrous to put it mildly.
While Tarantino's style and humor was refreshing early in his career, - especially so in the uninhibited and brilliant Pulp Fiction (1994), - it is here stale and old-fashioned: Some of the film's comedy is witnessing DiCaprio's pathetic protagonist describe Mexican girls as 'chili peppers' and 'hot tamales'; another rests on Pitt's character having murdered his wife and gotten away with it. This doesn't mean that the film reveals a misogynistic or racist filmmaker, necessarily, but there's so much more of it: A fetishized child actor (played by 10 year-old Julia Butters (13 Hours (2016))), martial arts legend Bruce Lee getting slanderously poured down the drain in another scene that depicts him as a ridiculous, whimsical braggadocio; and then there's the film's third and last starring actor, Margot Robbie (About Time (2013)), who is treated to a third 'lead' part here (portraying ill-fated actress Sharon Tate) that involves her just being wonderful, pregnant, and not speaking.
Tarantino has been criticized for at least two of these things, and this film is one case where such criticism actually hits a sore point. Because this under-use of Robbie's talents is peculiar.
The film has no central narrative; it consists mostly of Dalton and Cliff's moseying around Hollywood (and Rome); and it is long. Pitt is what works best in it as the laid back, manly Cliff. SPOILER One scene has him pick up an underage girl hitchhiker, who brazenly asks him for sex in the car minutes later. The scene seems a clear reference to Sharon Tate's husband, master filmmaker Roman Polanski's later felony of engaging in sex with a 13 year-old girl in Los Angeles, which gave him a short prison sentence, and whose further consequences led him to flee the US for Europe. The scene has Pitt admirably adamant in his refusing the girl's advances; yet she is also so natural, alluring and forwardly sexual that it implicitly seems to inject that underage girls are also sometimes really after an older man sexually. (But as the Polanski case was a 13 year-old, and this 'girl' here is just about a woman, it shows a mature response while visually condoning Polanski, whom Tarantino has also defended for his misdeed without inhibition in the past.) Plenty of audiences will miss this and many other more or less pregnant references in the film, as every one who isn't a Hollywood and movie aficionado will, and as this review shows, it may be for the better, though it also robs them of the opportunity to really evaluate the film.
SPOILER The following scenes at the Spahn ranch, where Charles Manson's 'family' had found a home under the lonely, unknowing roofs of blind ranch-owner George Spahn (Bruce Dern (Nebraska (2013))), seem to be Tarantino's rejection of Communism (as practiced by the Mansonite hippies), this as experienced by the sure-footed stand-up guy of Pitt's Cliff. A curious side-note it that radically left-wing Lena Dunham (Girls (2012-17)) for some strange reason cameos as one of the hippies.
The film may have been salvaged by the right ending, but the ending is its worst part:
SPOILER Tarantino more or less repeats what he did in Inglourious Basterds (2009), when he had Diane Krueger kill Hitler, Goebbels and a cinema jam-packed with other Nazi scum in its maverick, ahistoric ending. In this case DiCaprio and Pitt kill the three Manson family loons who go to their house instead of the one next door, (where the real massacre took place, the killing of 8½ months pregnant Tate and 4 other people), and do so in a seemingly violent mayhem of glee at the Tarantino's rectifying another historic wrong. Yet this one is somehow "too close to home" and just wrong.
It comes off as an immature and bizarre ending to a detailed and entertaining but lethargic serving from a filmmaker who is way past his own heyday and doesn't know it, or doesn't care.
Related posts:
Quentin Tarantino: 2019 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2019 in films - according to Film Excess
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
Django Unchained (2012) - Tarantino's gutsy, colorful 'Southern'
Inglourious Basterds (2009) - The Movies take revenge on Nazi scum
2007 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
Top 10: Best car chases in movies reviewed by Film Excess to date
Death Proof (2007) - Tarantino's awesome, rubber-burning Grindhouse homage
From Dusk till Dawn (1996) - Tarantino, Rodriguez and chums' enjoyable Mexico vampire extravaganza (writer-star)
Desperado (1995) - Rodriguez' second Mexico actioner is a sexy, latino fireball (actor)
Four Rooms (1995) - Rodriguez, Tarantino & Co. fail with LA hotel anthology comedy (co-director)
Cost: 95 mil. $
Box office: 244.2 mil. $ and counting
= Box office success (has currently returned 2.57 times its cost)
[Once Upon a Time in Hollywood premiered 21 May (Cannes Film Festival, France, in competition) and runs 161 minutes. It is Tarantino's first major feature made without the involvement of The Weinstein Company, as Tarantino's backed away from them following the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which began rolling in October 2017. He instead made an impressive deal with Sony, which included them distributing and he receiving final cut privilege, a 95 mil. $ budget, 25 % first-dollar gross, - a rare and very lucrative deal for the filmmaker, - as well as getting the film rights after 10 to 20 years. DiCaprio and Pitt were both paid 10 mil. $ for their performances. Shooting took place in California, including Los Angeles, from June - November 2018. A reported, huge 110 mil. $ were spent to market the film; with this and Tarantino's extraordinary deal in mind, estimates say that the film needs to pass 400 mil. $ to start being profitable theatrically. It opened #2, behind holdover hit The Lion King, to a 41 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 2 weeks in the top 5 (#3-#5) and has grossed 126.6 mil. $ to date. The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets to date are Russia with 15.8 mil. $ and the UK with 15.4 mil. $. The film is listed as a US/UK/Chinese co-production, but it doesn't look like it will get a Chinese release, (it has come out in Hong Kong and Taiwan though.) It has one scheduled market left to open in: Italy on 18 September. The film won a dog award in Cannes and is guaranteed to have been forgotten by Oscar time. But IMDb's users have voted into #232 on the site's Top 250, sitting between Swades (2004) and PK (2014). Tarantino want to make a Star Trek movie as his 10th and last feature, - but let's see. DiCaprio returns in either gangster drama The Black Hand or crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon; Pitt returns in Ad Astra (2019); Robbie in Bombshell (2019). Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is certified fresh at 85 % with a 7.81/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
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