Fantastic Music and Weak Acting

Rating: 5/10 (3 May 2017)

Once follows two people: a busker/songwriter and a young woman with a broken vacuum cleaner.
As expected of John Carney, the music is great. And similar to his latest film, Sing Street, he is very aware of that and spends at least a solid 1/3 of this movie in song. Most of the music is heard all the way through, and thankfully the music is good so it makes it just that much easier to sit through. While I didn't like the music as much as Sing Street and I think that it did get redundant after a while, thus reducing its rewatchability, it was still good and it's a soundtrack that I plan on revisiting.
As for the writing and directing, both were kind of off and on. While the hand-held camera use was suited to making the movie somewhat more lifelike (like a documentary), it could be somewhat nauseating and difficult to keep up with. The directing also seemed like a cop-out for the often faulty writing that proved to be rather unconvincing and awkward at times. But at the same time the music is well-written and some of the dialogue is really good too.
My biggest problem with the movie, however, was Markéta Irglová. Her acting ranged from fine to just plain stale. There were so many points where I audibly remarked on how bad her acting was, despite being completely alone on my couch. The rest of the acting is mostly fine, but she was just so wooden. Her lines were delivered with no emotion or tone or anything whatsoever most of the time. It was as if she was just reading her lines off a nearby sheet of paper. Her best acting seemed to come from when she forgot her lines and stumbled over them, which at the least added some naturalism to them.
Overall Once is good, but it's ultimately weighed down by inconsistent writing and directing and some poor acting. Sure the music is great, but as a movie it's okay. It's like John Carney didn't know how to get his music out into the world without performing it, so he made a movie about it and didn't hold back. In the end I would really only recommend the movie to select people, specifically ones who would like the musical aspect.