Reviews

My anticipation of this movie was high because Quentin Tarantino movies have always rated top drawer with me. For and opening 10/15 minutes, the introduction to the characters is fairly strong and what you'd expect for most films, but following this, there isn't really any grabbing storyline. *spoilers ahead* While I never felt bored while watching Rick Dalton's(Leonardo DeCaprio) struggles in his late acting career and Cliff Booth's(Brad Pitt) adventures as he drove round looking for things to do as an unemployed stuntman; I just constantly felt like something more needed to happen. Even when late on in the film, we find Cliff discovering his old acting set has been taken over by a group of hippies (Mansons cult), there's a lot of tension and feeling that this is where it all starts to unfold and the story is going to get more eventful...but apart from a slightly entertaining beat down delivered by Brad's character, again this comes to nothing.

Credit where it's due, the final 15 minutes do become very "Quentin-esque" as the almost comic style violence does meet expectations, but unfortunately for me, this was too late on to save the films overall rating.

While I understand the purpose behind the films story, that Leonardo's character needed a reason to befriend his way into his hollywood director (Roman Polanski's) neighbour's house so he could re-vamp his own Hollywood career and that this weird backstory(which is very much all it was) of the Manson murders was the eventual weird reason he managed this; we don't see enough growth leading up to this point and I would have liked to have seen much more of the cult's deranged activities.