This review contains spoilers.

I’ll keep this one short as I generally enjoyed the film, but there’s some stuff I found troubling and three days after seeing it, am still thinking about.

First two and a half hours were vintage Tarantino: super-long scenes with great dialogue, a laidback feel and some splendid performances, with DiCaprio especially knocking it out the park. The scene with Cliff at the ranch is some of the tensest, most gripping material Tarantino has produced in a long time.

It’s just everything post-Italy that feels off to me. I know Inglorious Basterds did it first, but rewriting the history of the murder of just a few individuals feels a lot more personal and in poor taste than the classic good-versus-evil of making the Nazis lose early. Taking such a tragedy, where a pregnant woman was brutally murdered, which literally changed Hollywood and is still so significant now, and making it into a wacky, played-for-laughs finale certainly feels in poor taste.

Maybe a rewatch, knowing what trajectory the film takes, would iron this out, and maybe the climax would be a lot less jarring, unsatisfying, and somewhat cheap. But on one viewing, it feels a very unbalanced picture: a terrific two-thirds which could’ve amounted to one of Tarantino’s best, this loses focus and switches its tone in an unsatisfying and cheap manner.

★★★

I never really ask for people to leave comments but if you’ve seen the film and fancy having a chat about the ending, perhaps a different interpretation, I’d truly love to discuss it. This film has been so divisive and I enjoyed those first two acts so much that I’d love to see other people’s interpretations of the ending.

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