I watched “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” recently, and I really want to talk about it. The movie is incredible by the way, go watch it.
This movie is so many things at once that if I tried to list them all, that would be the opinion, so I am going to make the executive decision here and only talk about the last 20 minutes of the movie, and why it makes the whole movie work. I am going to explain the ending with no context to the rest of the movie, with a couple of concessions, because it’s more fun that way.
When Cliff and Rick, a duo of actor and stuntman, return from their six-month movie making marathon in Italy, Rick realizes that he can no longer afford Cliff as his stunt-double anymore, so the guys have one last night out. The duo goes to a Mexican restaurant, drinks enough that they have to call a cab to get back home and then Cliff goes to walk his dog while smoking a cigarette that was dipped in LSD.
When Cliff returns to the house, at around 12:15 a.m., he feeds his dog, when all of a sudden, three hippies break into the house, and Cliff kills two of them by blunt force trauma, while Rick gets the third from a flamethrower that he had in the tool shed. During the fight, Cliff gets stabbed in the side, so he gets wheeled off to the hospital after he gives the police a report of the incident.
Rick gets invited over by his neighbors to their house, this house being occupied by famous directors and actors. This sounds made up like I fabricated this whole ending to a movie to prove a point, but no, it’s real, and it’s perfect.
The ending is a resolution to everything that was built up in the movie, Cliff gets to relive his glory days in the military by fighting some hippies while high on LSD, and Rick gets to be the action hero one last time.
Rick also gets the comfort of knowing that he is not a washed-up has-been because his neighbors recognize him from his TV show, “Bounty Law.” This movie’s ending, while ridiculous in nature, is an incredible summation of the character arcs of the two protagonists in this storyline of the movie.
For the people asking, “What numerical score would you give it?”, ’cause they’re boring, 9/10, amazing.
