The pros and cons of Quentin Tarantino’s meta twist on ‘The Movie Critic’
Having placed almost unattainable pressure on himself, the tenth and final feature of Quentin Tarantino‘s career is going to be viewed by many as a crushing disappointment if it isn’t the best movie he’s ever made, which could help explain why The Movie Critic was abandoned so late in the day.
For the last couple of years, Tarantino has been talking up his proposed swansong, only to suddenly switch gears after deciding it wasn’t the best way to bow out after all. It’s back to the drawing board for the two-time Academy Award winner, then, but the idea of making it a metatextual reflection on his filmography was an undeniably fascinating one.
It’s become increasingly clear that Tarantino is obsessed with his own legacy, to the point where it’s become an all-consuming desire on his part to quit on the perfect note. If he whiffed the landing, then history would remember him as the guy who spent so long painstakingly curating his mythology only to fuck it up at the final hurdle, which simply won’t do.
His work has regularly planted its tongue in cheek, flirted with the fourth wall, and carries an air of self-reflexiveness, which has occasionally flirted with the smug. Turning The Movie Critic into an ode to himself could potentially have placed it somewhere between the egotistical and self-aggrandising, but on the other, it would have offered the perfect way to ride off into the sunset.
After regular collaborator Brad Pitt’s name was mentioned in conjunction with the cast, it emerged that he may have been in line to reprise his Oscar-winning role as Cliff Booth from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Not only that, but Tarantino was also toying with reuniting with several stars from past projects who would either reprise their characters from his universe, or play fictional versions of themselves who played the characters in his films.
Timeline-wise, it doesn’t really add up, and it could have easily come across as The Movie Critic serving as nothing more than one final, lasting monument to its creator’s ego, especially given the tales that there was a chance a teenaged Tarantino working as an usher at a porno theatre would be folded into the on-screen narrative in the ultimate act of self-congratulatory backslapping.
If there’s anyone that could have pulled it off, though, it’s Tarantino. After all, he’s made a career out of deftly walking tonal tightropes and veering just on the right side of winking at the audience, and considering that everybody would have known well ahead of time that The Movie Critic was the end of the line – which will realistically form the backbone of the marketing for whatever his next movie ends up being anyway – it’s not unreasonable to assume it wouldn’t devolve into two and a half hours of masturbatory references to his own greatness.
On the other, if he didn’t pull it off, it could have been an unmitigated disaster. Tarantino is more concerned with how history will remember him than continuing to live out his dreams as a director for as long as he wants to and having that sentiment splashed all over every single frame of The Movie Critic could completely crater it. There’s a happy medium to be struck, and he’ll find it eventually one way or the other, but there were enough serious question marks that he decided going down a rabbit hole of his own making wasn’t the best way to do it.