Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
★½ — Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
Quentin Tarantino's ninth feature arrived in 2019 as his most personal and most sprawling work, a love letter to the Los Angeles of his own childhood set against the long shadow of the Manson Family murders of August 1969. Produced partly with Chinese money through Bona Film Group (which caused its own complications, including last-minute edits for the Chinese release), the film carried a $95 million budget, substantial for an auteur piece with no action franchise behind it, and went on to gross nearly $400 million worldwide. It reunited Tarantino with Columbia Pictures and British producer David Heyman (of the Harry Potter series), and marked the first time DiCaprio and Pitt had shared top billing in a major studio production.
A zit on the perfect bumcheek that is Tarantino's cinema repertoire. Tarantino loves revisionist history. Fair enough. Inglourious Basterds was brilliant. Django Unchained was even better. But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? This is where the indulgence curdles. Let’s start with the most egregious part: the utter disrespect towards Bruce Lee. One of the most important actors, martial artists, and cultural icons of the 20th century, reduced to a pompous caricature for the sake of making Brad Pitt look cool. It’s an insult not just to Lee’s legacy but to anyone who actually understands what he represented. The man broke barriers in Hollywood, only for Tarantino to gleefully smash his reputation in a scene that never needed to exist. Then there’s the way the film exploits real-life tragedy. The Manson murders were horrific, and yet Tarantino twists them into a bizarre power fantasy, where his fictional heroes get to rewrite history with flamethrowers and bloody spectacle. It feels cheap. Glib. Like the audience is meant to cheer as real-life victims get replaced with Hollywood’s revenge-fuelled alternative reality. Beyond that, the film is just bloated. The pacing meanders, DiCaprio and Pitt are coasting on charisma alone, and the ending feels like a cheap payoff for sitting through nearly three hours of a story that barely goes anywhere. Tarantino clearly wanted this to be his love letter to old Hollywood, but in doing so, he lost sight of what made his best films great. A self-indulgent, revisionist fairytale that rewrites history for its own amusement at the expense of actual legacy.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-04-02
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Quentin Tarantino: Inglourious Basterds (2009) · Pulp Fiction (1994) · Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) · Reservoir Dogs (1992)
More with Leonardo DiCaprio: Blood Diamond (2006) · The Beach (2000) · One Battle After Another (2025) · Gangs of New York (2002)
More from China: Skiptrace (2016) · Men in Black: International (2019) · New Police Story (2004) · Police Story: Lockdown (2013)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
