Director's Cut Just as crappy as the 1984 Hatchet Job

Rating: 2/10 (7 July 2019)

Remember when all the critics said this movie was great but got turned into an incomprehensible mess by the studio. Turns out they were lying. Once Upon A Time in America is a bloated, pointlessly violent, disgustingly r#pey, badly acted, boringly plotted pile of movie junk at any length.
It's hard to believe that the same man who wrote and directed Once Upon A Time in the West, with one of the strongest female characters in Western movie history (Claudia Cardinale's Jill McBain) or even Mrs Baxter in A Fistful of Dollars, could pen and helm a movie where the women apparently exist merely to be sexually assaulted.
Leone was on more solid ground in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly where there are, in effect, zero female characters and the entire sprawling epic rests on a love/hate triangle among three memorable male characters. The relationships in this, his final feature, are entirely unbelievable and unsympathetic. And my goodness the juvenile actors. they're more obnoxious than The Bowery Boys.
I thought Duck, You Sucker was Leone at the bottom of the barrel. But he saved his worst for last.
Special mention to Morricone for turning in a career-worst movie score. And to McGovern (or whoever dubbed her voice), who can't seem to decide whether her character is a surfer girl or some pseudo-Euro like Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly or any number of other mid-century actresses with fake posh accents.
Twist ending, so to speak, doesn't save it. Merely turns it from the tragedy Leone was trying to make into the farce the ticket-buying public treated it as.
I watched the entire thing, though, so I give myself 2 stars.