This is Fiction, just Fiction.

Rating: 9/10 (21 December 2019)

If De Nero and Pacino had collaborated to make a new film, (hang on, there's 'The Irishman', forgot that), would we expect a 'Godfather Pt 4', or, 'Casino'; 'Goodfella's'; 'Serpico'; 'Heat'; etc. With the same gun-toting violence that accompanied them ? What would we have ? Well, in a word, 'repeats'.
Repeats that cannot fulfill their immediate original excitement because time, and we, have moved on.
So what Scorsese and Tarantino have done is to move the 'swashbuckling' into a new phase and direction, where character, not CGI, (albeit sometimes necessarily present), dominates.
I agree, it's not for all - blood soaked walls and Sergio Leone's heavy overcoats falling onto wooden sidewalks still arouse. But more of the same ? Again and again ?
To repeat, this is fiction. Fiction imbibed with period references, that's all.
If the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969 had not occurred would there be such a furore ? Tarantino has deliberately distanced himself from this by not being sucked into its factual history, creating a fiction.
Pitt and Dicaprio; De Nero and Pacino are wholesome, three-dimensional characters deserving praise. We should be thankful, not only for Scorsese and Tarantino's earlier, visceral works, but their maturity as they develop into hardened observers of the human condition.