Quentin Tarantino famously taught himself the vocabulary of cinema working at a video rental store in 1980’s LA. The glow from old westerns and kung-fu movies – his celluloid rosetta stone – unlocking the secret language of a medium of which he would soon seek mastery. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, the director’s tenth movie (which he questionably calls his ninth) is both an ode to Tarantino’s cinematic upbringing and an overtly didactic examination of a Hollywood he never experienced, one in the groans of transition, leaving behind the Golden-era glow for something more experimental and hipsterish, filtered through the lens of American political rebellion and the chintzy nature of fame.

His most poetic and wanderlust-provoked film, Hollywood sees Tarantino wrestling with legacy, distilling the many themes and reference points of his previous ventures into an overly simplified treatise on heroes and has-beens that never adds up to much of anything aside from a towering ode to himself.

Tarantino’s idol-worshipping at the altar of cinema has had an omnipresent role in his films – the hat tips to the bowels of film history so dense and so extensive that even the most film literal will throw up their hands in defeat – but Hollywood sees the LA-native erecting a tribute to himself in uncharacteristically groaning fashion. Rick Dalton, a has-been of an actor who failed to exchange his leading man digs in a popular Western show for full-fledged movie stardom, and played convincingly by a stuttering and dispirited Leonardo DiCaprio, is Tarantino’s cipher in the film.

As Dalton struggles to reclaim a marketable image in a fastlane world, Tarantino too tries to dig his heels into his own legacy by road-tripping through his filmography, awkwardly forcing pit stops in places where he’s found success before.

Hollywood is a Tarantino almanac. In a telling bit of interconnectivity, it’s revealed that Dalton’s turns in pop-entertainment mirrors QT’s own work, starring in both a popular bounty hunter series and a WWII revenge flick wherein he toasts a theater full of Nazis with a sneering “Anyone order fried sauerkraut?” There’s stuntmen and karaté; a man who maybe killed a bride and dusty gunslingers – would you look at that? – not even one N-word drop.

The gerrymandering is obvious, Tarantino drawing political lines in the sand to enshrine his esteemed filmography. But for what purpose? Theories suggesting that Tarantino’s films all exist in the same universe have always proved compelling and fun to dig into but tying his worlds together explicitly for what seems like little more than vapid easter egg collection is hardly the tenor of cleverness I would have anticipated from a once masterful storyteller. The vapidity continues unassumingly.

From Red Apple cigarettes to Royales with Cheese, Tarantino’s films are littered with faux-product placement but none moreso than Hollywood. Its soundtrack is a constant barrage of advertisement. Perhaps this is cagey commentary on Los Angeles’ culture of commodification; transforming people into products to be bought and sold by the whims of some cigarillo-twirling money man in a gaudy suit. Or maybe it’s just another degree of filler in a movie drowning in filler. It’s more than likely a bit of both.

Accompanying stunt man Cliff (Brad Pitt, graced with the movie’s rare true blue zingers) on many a rove through neon-illuminated or sun-splashed L.A., the Xanax-approved pace attempts to lull audiences into a sense of false profundity.

As the accoutrements of the film threaten to outweigh the substance, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fails to bring its characters to life, in large part because Tarantino’s snappy dialogue has lost that Hattori Hanzo edge. Gone is the amusing and arrogant bloviating, the pithy razor-blade retorts, the old-timey and semi-charmed speak, replaced by long bouts of silence and milk-and-water scripting.

Lacking entirely in momentum and suspense, Hollywood invests an abundance of mileage in what seems to be the absence of entertainment. There’s irony to the fact that Tarantino has shooed off the breaking of his film into chapters and yet this feels like his most disjointed film yet. Scenes stumble and spill from one to the next, the many movie-within-a-movie elements presenting glaring pacing and practical issues wherein the viewer drifts in and out of multiple layers of storytelling without getting the wherewithal to invest in any of them. There’s a sequence wherein a character literally watches themselves on screen that goes on for an indeterminate infinity.

Worse still, Tarantino has allegedly made a movie about “friendship” that fundamentally misunderstands the concept of friends. It’s almost as if Tarantino has never had a genuine friend – something that’s not too far-fetched to buy – and so writing from experience produces an unconvincing tenuity. Servitude is mistaken for companionship. Stuntman Cliff is to Rick Dalton as pitbull Brandy is to Stuntman Cliff. Their’s is a friendship with no weight to it and despite the compelling heft of DiCaprio and Pitt’s performances, they get punishingly few minutes together onscreen.

Boasting a who’s who of talent, Tarantino’s film makes no demand for awards consideration. There’s just too many people sharing the screen, from Margot Robbie (who barely gets a few lines in, despite the camera generously narrowingly in on her feet) to Margaret Qualley (the film’s secret bright spot star), the characters are shallow and without great charm, as vapid as the Hollywood-averse claim the area to be. The cast list is plump with Tarantino veterans and newbies alike including Timothy Olyphant, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Scoot NcNairy, Michael Madsen, Zoë Bell, Lena Dunham, and a totally unrecognizable Dakota Fanning but they’re more cameos than supporting players, the weight of the quirky collective swallowing itself ouroboros-style so that none really get to the chance to shine.

Just as Dalton’s is a preposterous dance of trying to get his groove back so too is Hollywood Tarantino’s formal failed experimental in addition by subtraction. In line with its fairytale title, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood is bookish in a way that no Tarantino movie has been before while also being his most laconic film to date. Stripping his film bare of the no-holds-barred violence and warbly diatribes that define his usual work, Tarantino stumbles. It’s no accident that the film’s climax, his last gasp attempt to reclaim some entertainment value out of the meandering mire, sees a return to gleeful wallopings and stick-it-to-em vengeance.

At the height of his powers, Tarantino rewrote the end of the Second World War and the Third Reich, basking in the heat of Hitler’s gory demise, but his attempts to reshape events of 1969 Hollywood is old hat. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a whole lot of movie in service of a rather pedestrian gimmick. One that masks Tarantino’s thinly veiled ode to himself, surreptitiously preaching the merits of his puffy reputation. His tenth film is his most hollow and vainglorious work yet, a bitter disappointment that I can only hope improves upon further examination, and the first that genuinely struggles to emit entertainment as if from a bottomless well within the writer-director’s soul. Perhaps Tarantino was right after all. Perhaps it is time to retire.

CONCLUSION: A bloated and self-congratulatory ballad about rewriting history and demanding a place in the textbooks among the greats, ‘Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood’ is the movie equivalent of asparagus; long, thin and wont to leave an odd lingering smell well after.