Film Review - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the new film by Quinten Tarantino and takes place in Hollywood 1969 and concerns Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his best friend/stunt man Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) who drive around sunny LA, Rick struggles with a career transition from Television to the Movies and meanwhile Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is also enjoying life in LA during this time.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is for me a very fun movie and a lot of that fun comes from the chemistry and performances of Mr DiCaprio and Mr Pitt the two of them here are extremely good and have great chemistry and when they are doing their thing they are fantastic to watch and you can’t take your eyes off them.

I also really liked all of the scenes on the movie lot and seeing the day to day life of all the actors and the crew and there are like a lot of Tarantino films a slew of great performances such as the late great Sideshow Luke Perry, Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning and Timothy Olyphant among others and the production design and cinematography are also superb.

Sadly however Ms Margot Robbie is wasted as the late Ms Tate and a lot of the time her scenes in a deeply regrettable way feel disjointed from the main storyline of Rick and Cliff and for a good hour and a quarter Ms Robbie has no lines of dialogue at all virtually and it just feels like a waste as Margot radiates screen presence and reminded me of why I thought to myself “She will be Big” after Wolf of Wall Street and given the very sad real life circumstances of the woman she is playing there is a part of me that wishes this had either been a much bigger side plot in the movie or its own movie outright but that’s Tarantino for you.

And so that was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and it’s a fun movie that encapsulates both the best and the frustrating of Tarantino’s work and while it’s a more fun movie than either Hateful Eight or Django Unchained it still doesn’t quite reach his 90s and 2000s heights of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill or Inglorious Basterds, 3 and a half out of 5.