Once Upon a Time in the Caribbean (2023)
★★★ — Once Upon a Time in the Caribbean (2023)
There's a moment early in Once Upon a Time in the Caribbean where a character is introduced not by name, but by the name of their machete. It's a small touch, but it told me everything I needed to know about what kind of film this was going to be. This is a film that understands the grammar of the western, the weight of a weapon, the mythology of a man, and it's doing something genuinely exciting with all of it. The fact that it doesn't quite stick the landing doesn't make that excitement any less real.
Set in rural Puerto Rico, this is a slow-burn western drama with the soul of a samurai film baked right into its bones. From the very first frame, the visual language announces itself: sun-bleached colours, wide shots of rugged fields and forests, compositions that feel unmistakably Kurosawa-influenced, that same sense of figures dwarfed by landscape, of moral weight pressing down from every angle. The story follows a former sugarcane worker pulled back into violence when a local land baron kidnaps his wife. It's a familiar setup, but the setting makes it feel fresh, rooted in place, language, and rhythm in a way that a lot of genre filmmaking simply isn't.
The cinematography is genuinely gorgeous. Golden fields, shadowy forests, machetes catching the light like katanas. There's a haunting soundtrack too, something that pulses like a heartbeat beneath the quieter scenes, keeping the tension alive even when the plot is taking its time. The film wears its influences proudly, the stoic protagonist, the moral arithmetic of vengeance, the slow accumulation of dread before violence erupts, but it's wearing them through a distinctly Caribbean lens. That matters. This doesn't feel like pastiche. It feels like reimagination, a genre being claimed rather than just copied.
I found myself thinking about Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) while watching this, another film doing serious work with genre aesthetics to tell a story that's deeply tied to its own cultural roots. Both films understand that style isn't decoration. It's argument.
But here's where I have to be honest, because the second half let me down. The momentum stumbles somewhere around the midpoint, and it stumbles badly enough that you feel it. Themes that were building with real purpose start repeating themselves without deepening. The film is clearly trying to say something meaningful about justice, legacy, and the cost of violence, and I believed in that ambition completely in the first half. By the final act, though, I was watching the showdown I'd seen coming from a mile off, and a redemption arc that doesn't quite earn its emotional payoff. The film takes too long to arrive at conclusions it had already telegraphed.
None of that undoes the craft on display. This is a powerful, visually stunning piece of work, ambitious and authentic in ways that matter, and a real achievement for Puerto Rican cinema. It's just a bit too long, and a little too familiar by the end. The middle sags when it should be tightening the screw, and that's a pacing problem that a tighter edit might have fixed entirely.
Still, I'm glad I watched it, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves the genre. Three and a half stars, and I mean that genuinely. The highs here are high enough that the stumbles don't ruin it. They just stop it from being the classic it occasionally threatens to become.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-08-23
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US
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