Robin Solsjö Höglund’s review published on Letterboxd:
This is the first Tarantino movie in a long time that I didn't leave grinning from ear to ear.
Hollywood, 1969. Rick Dalton is an actor known for doing TV westerns who is struggling to adapt to New Hollywood and whose career is sliding into obscurity. His best friend is his stuntman and driver Cliff Booth, and he occasionally looks over at his neighbours on Cielo Drive with envy - Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.
Watching this was an odd experience. Our audience was almost completely quiet. A few very small chuckles and sounds, but mostly a pressed, heavy, awkward silence. After it was done, a friend of a friend said it was "the most boring movie he had ever seen", which is an overstatement to say the least. But it got me thinking.
Maybe it's that the film is set in 60's Hollywood (and an homage to it), maybe it's the way it's presented (a lot of style but practically no real active "plot"), but perhaps it's that modern audiences are just awash with superhero blockbusters, jam packed with brain-numbing action and silly family humor galore every two minutes. So when a film like this comes along, we've all, including me, been sort of "deprogrammed" from it. There's nothing more painful in the world than to go into a highly anticipated Tarantino movie and just kind of..endure it awkwardly, but that was the vibe. It's rather sad, the film should be appreciated because of all those things, but it fell on deaf ears a bit.
I don't think that's quite all though. The film has a lot of respectable components: DiCaprio throws himself into the role of a frustrated actor, there's plenty of style throughout (but I could summarize it as 60's music, driving, oh so much driving, and..feet, oh so many feet). It has standout scenes, my two favorites being Cliff getting into a little scuffle with an exceptionally arrogant Bruce Lee, and Rick doing his work as a western bad guy, alongside a kind of young Meryl Streep in the making. It's a great movie within a movie, and only one of dozens.
I do sort of feel like it was..too much of a good thing though. Tarantino is resting on his laurels now, and even though it's an interesting idea to make a "day in the life" type of movie, it also means he's almost solely resting on his style and cinematic trickery: you know exactly what I mean. Blaring music, driving, naked feet, fun and abrupt editing choices, movies within movies, ultraviolence, the works. He showers you with style and tone, but the plot is thin and sort of meandering. I thought "alright, we've had three driving scenes and two pairs of feet, the plot is going to kick in soon", but it just keeps going.
The ending was wild and funny, but it also struck me as "oh you, silly old Tarantino you". We know it. We've seen it. 99.9% dialogue, sudden absurdly overblown scene of comedic violence. It was done in Basterds. It was done in Django. It was done in The Hateful Eight. And then they lived happily ever after, which also rung a bit false to me. It's cute, but is it really good? I think I'll chalk this up to "it's fine". Cute ideas, a command of the camera and the style, and a few standout scenes, but the overall film certainly didn't leave my soul aroused and begging for more.
I think if you can just kind of "go along with it, man", as the hippies might, you'll dig this one too. It's a story about a man losing relevance in Hollywood because he's falling back on the same old thing he knows over and over again..and I wonder if that wasn't a little too meta this time. If Quentin only has one more movie in him, I hope he knocks it right out of the park. This was something, but not the something I was hoping for.