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Like the Tate-LaBianca murders, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a senseless massacre; and like Charles Manson's Helter Skelter scenario, the film's script is but the incoherent ranting and raving of an egomaniacal lunatic.
That this near-three hour-long dumpster fire is at all watchable is a testament to the combined talents of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, who have undeniable onscreen chemistry. Somewhere under the landslide of pointless cameos lies buried a good movie about Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth.
Instead, we get interminable scenes of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) going book shopping, going to the movies, and so on and so forth. This would actually go a long way —figuratively, that is, as opposed to just literally — toward creating a sense of dread as we anticipate Sharon’s unavoidable doom.
Leave it to Tarantino, however, to find a way to avoid it. Somehow, the only thing in worse taste than exploiting her ignominious death is giving it the Inglorious Basterds revisionist treatment. These aren’t Marvel characters that you can bring back from the dead by snapping your fingers; Tate and the other Manson family victims were real human beings with hopes and dreams. Does Tarantino really believe that we need his arrogant, pompous ass to tell us that they should have lived and not died?
The saddest part of all is that QT didn’t used to be an arrogant, pompous ass. In fact, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood may remind you of Pulp Fiction’s interweaving stories — except for the 'interweaving' part. There is a lot of cause-and-effect in Pulp Fiction; Jules's encounter with Ringo at the restaurant would have gone very differently had Jules not previously experienced his "miracle," and Jules and Vincent would not have ended up in that restaurant to begin with if Vincent had not shot Marvin in the face.
In contrast, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is all random meandering. It makes little or no difference whether Rick goes to Italy to shoot spaghetti westerns or Cliff visits the Spahn Ranch or not, because absolutely nothing that happens before the arbitrarily tacked-on climax leads in any way to it. The movie beats around the bush for over 150 minutes before finally arriving at any kind of destination only to make us wish, once it gets there, that it had just continued wandering aimlessly.