Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
★½ — Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
A zit on the perfect bumcheek that is Tarantino's filmography. That's the only way I can put it. Because I genuinely love what this man is capable of. Inglourious Basterds (2009) is brilliant, and Django Unchained is even better in my view. Tarantino doing revisionist history, giving the finger to how things actually went and replacing it with something cathartic and operatic, that's a mode he genuinely excels in. So when Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood arrived, I wanted to love it. I really did. What I got instead was nearly three hours of self-indulgence curdling in front of my eyes.
Let me get to the worst of it straight away, because it's the thing I can't get past: the Bruce Lee scene. One of the most important figures of the 20th century, an actor and martial artist who had to fight tooth and nail to be taken seriously in a Hollywood that didn't want him, reduced here to a preening, loud-mouthed caricature so that Brad Pitt can look effortlessly cool. It's genuinely insulting. Not just to Lee's memory and legacy, but to anyone who understands what he actually represented and what it cost him to get where he got. The scene didn't need to exist. It adds nothing to the film that couldn't have been achieved another way. Tarantino made a choice, and it's a poor one.
Then there's the question of what the film is actually doing with the Manson murders. Tarantino's revisionist instinct, the thing that made Basterds soar, tips over here into something that feels glib and oddly cheap. The Manson murders were a real, horrific tragedy involving real people. Wrapping them in a power fantasy where fictional Hollywood heroes get to rewrite the night with flamethrowers and brutal slapstick spectacle left me cold. I didn't feel the release the film seemed to be reaching for. I felt uneasy. There's a difference between reclaiming history and treating it like a playground, and I think this film crosses that line without ever seeming to notice.
And if I put those specific grievances aside, even just for a moment, I'm still left with a film that's bloated and aimless. The pacing wanders all over the place. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are both charming enough, but they're coasting on charisma rather than being asked to do anything genuinely demanding. There are scenes that seem to exist purely because Tarantino was enjoying himself, and fair enough that he was, but enjoyment in the director's chair doesn't automatically translate to engagement in the audience's seat. It didn't here.
The tragedy is that I can see what Tarantino was after. A warm, woozy tribute to a Hollywood era he clearly adores, the kind of filmmaking equivalent of flicking through old photographs. But the sentimentality he wraps around it doesn't earn its running time, and the revisionist finale, rather than feeling earned the way it does in his stronger work, just feels like a shrug dressed up as a firework.
Tarantino's worst films are still made by someone who knows how to construct a scene, and there are individual moments here that work. But knowing how to build a room doesn't mean the house is worth living in. This one isn't. It's self-satisfied, intermittently disrespectful, and far too pleased with itself to notice when it's going wrong.
One and a half stars.
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)
