Disappointing...

Rating: 7/10 (24 May 2020)

With all of these great reviews, Oscars, and it being a Quentin Tarantino film, I held Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood to an extremely high expectation. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is such a strange movie to me: it has Tarantino's directing style, but it doesn't feel like one of his movies. I really wanted to love this movie because I'm a huge Tarantino fan, but this movie felt useless and overrated. And I can understand why people would love this movie, it's funny and it has a great ending, but this one wasn't exactly for me.
The plot butchered this movie in my opinion. During the runtime, you could feel Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood building up for something because of the pacing. The issue is that it was building up to something that wasn't defined at the beginning, so it felt like it was going nowhere. There were many scenes that were specifically for a character's development, so I thought all of them were going to me up and have some insane ending, like what a Tarantino film should have. The ending was quite unique in fact, as it was about Charles Manson's goons attacking Rick Dalton and his stunt double. I really liked this ending, as it took a different approach that was funny and satisfying in a Tarantino way. But I don't think the ending was worthy of a 2h 41min runtime.
The most redeeming aspect of the film was the acting. When you have Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, you'd expect to see some great performances. The sad part is that the characters aren't interesting enough to live up to the performances. One issue I have with the movie when it comes to the characters is how poorly they were used. Why have Margot Robbie play a character when the character barely even contributes to the final plot. This begs the question, why have the Polanski and Tate relationship if they were only slightly used at the ending.
I do like how stylistic Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is: Tarantino is great at making is film unique. It has that 60s vibe that is awesome when done right. Great song selection plays an important part in a 60s movie: it has to be upbeat and fun to set the mood. Tarantino also did a great job with making Rick Dalton's movies seem like a classic westerner.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is the greatest disappointment of Quentin Tarantino's directing career. This movie isn't bad though, it did a lot of things right, and I really wanted to like this movie, but there were too many issues. It had a weak plot that felt like it was going nowhere throughout the entire runtime. It misused almost half of the characters, and they weren't all that interesting. Honestly, I can see why a lot of people would like this movie, but it's too overrated for me.