chrisgarry-23882

Tarantino has lost the plot. In fact, there is no plot. The plot in Once Upon a Time is terrible.

Luckily, Brad Pitt and Leonardo Dicaprio do everything in their power to make this absolute mess tolerable - and, for the most part, they do a fantastic job. Their acting and rapport is remarkable.

Such a shame then, that the script is average at best.

There are lots of very pointless, random, irrelevant car-driving-around-LA scenes that drag on for far too long.

Tarantino is a car enthusiast - we get it. But we don't need it here, not for anywhere near this long.

Considering he took 5 years to write it, it really comes off as lazy.

Lazy is the one word that fits best, this is exactly what a director without direction would create.

The sad fact of the matter is that Tarantino has long lost his spark, his magic, his je nais se quois. So all he can muster at this point is a flaccid pastiche. A 60s satire. A 'B' movie. If anyone else had dared to have written this it would have been rejected by every major, and minor Hollywood studio without hesitation.

Starts like any other cringey, largely pointless series of its ilk with random people meeting one another and being massively over familiar.

Traitors though actually shows real promise.

The strategy at play and the dilemma posed throughout is quite simply brilliant.

This premise of real people not knowing whether they are alliging at all points with friend or foe is alluring enough to carry us quite blissfully through to episode 4 without noticing how much time has passed.

We can shrug off the massive waste of time which is the poorly conceived tasks, overlook the times when basically everyone begins crying real tears over the natural progression of the game and we can just about tolerate Ms Winkleman.

Where we finally have enough and switch off is where Traitors starts overtly deceiving us in terms of the expectations that we have as far as the specifics of the show.

It's fairly addictive and hard to turn away from - up until the point where, having had the reveals reliably land at the end of each episode, we are suddenly forced to wait until the beginning of episode 4 for the reveal of who has been banished from episode 3.

Granted you can just skip to the next episode, but its at this point anyone with any standards or with anything to do (other than simply binge-watch hours of garbage) begins to get annoyed.

The final straw comes when two characters who didnt make it into the show proper are suddenly inserted out of nowhere. How is that fair? How does that make any sense? Why did any of the show's producers think that was a good idea?

This was the exact poiny I gave up and decided to simply google the results, turn the show off and vow never to invest any more time in any of this utter tripe again.

Looking back, it really is a total cringefest featuring basic extras.

The number of times the show cuts from some form of action or real life clash to a calmer scene does make me question how much of the suspense and the unfolding of the game to take at face value.

Chances are they are all just acting (poorly) the entire time.

There aren't many particularly redeeming features of this snoozefest.

Sandler gives everything but comes up short.

Aniston gives very little and comes up shorter.

The plot is non existant. Just cliched Agatha Christie / Hercule Poirot drivel.

Avoid.

The worst thing about this movie is that at no point is it even funny. Never once will you find yourself genuinely laughing. So given the entire point of it is that it is a tonuge-in-cheek pastiche of a classic genre, the very least we might expect is some genuine comedy.

But no.

Someone got carried away with the idea of glitz and glamour, Monaco and picturesque Italy and took control.

This is the very antithesis of In Bruges.