Quentin Tarantino buckled in the face of his own legacy by shelving ‘The Movie Critic’
Up until relatively recently, not many people would have batted an eyelid were Quentin Tarantino to announce a script he was working on was no longer a priority, with the filmmaker shifting his focus to other potential directorial projects instead.
After all, the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction creator has hyped up a lot more movies that never ended up happening than the nine he’s helmed so far, with his catalogue of what-ifs littered with the likes of Killer Crow, Double V Vega, Kill Bill Vol. 3, Forty Lashes Less One, Django in White Hell, and many more besides.
He even planned to abandon The Hateful Eight altogether after the script was leaked, but he ultimately decided against it following the enthusiastic reception to a live table read, so Tarantino talking up films that never materialised was more than a regular occurrence. And yet, he’s in danger of buckling under the pressure of his own legacy after scrapping The Movie Critic, a situation entirely of his own making.
For years, the two-time Academy Award winner has repeatedly gone on record outlining his plans to bow out on a nice even ten, claiming that he didn’t want to become “an old-man filmmaker” who ended up as a shadow of their former self. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary being provided by Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg to name but three that age is just a number, Tarantino’s commitment has always carried an air of self-aggrandisement.
At first, he planned to call it quits at 60 years old, but that day has been gone, with the reasons behind the abandonment of The Movie Critic being given as a simple “he changed his mind”. That’s no doubt partially true, but Tarantino has heaped so much pressure upon himself to bow out in a fashion befitting the mythology he’s created around himself that he might well be in an unwinnable predicament.
The most pressing question is what would he do if his tenth and final feature was awful? Having crafted such an aura around his swansong and linking it so intrinsically to his desperation to be remembered as a flawless great, failing to stick the landing and ending on a serious downer would be nothing short of an embarrassment after he’d spent so long reiterating that it was the end of the line.
Not only that, but audience members and long-time fans of his work will struggle to view his tenth movie as a standalone work of cinema. Instead, it’ll be constantly lingering in the back of everyone’s minds that this is it, and the reception to whatever that project ends up being will be impossible to separate from his previous output and overall contributions to cinema precisely because he’d invested so much time in letting everyone know his career ends here.
Such concern over potentially tarnishing his own reputation offers an insight into Tarantino’s deep-seated fascination with being remembered for generations to come, too. It’s as if he doesn’t view his films as individual, independent entities that tell their own stories but as part of a carefully curated legacy that nobody other than himself was asking to be left behind. Almost every director makes at least one bad film, but Tarantino is so invested in what the history books may or may not have to say about him that the shelving of The Movie Critic comes across as the realisation the screenplay simply isn’t good enough to match its status as the grand finale and serve as the exclamation point to all that came before.
It might well be the case that the script isn’t up to snuff, but still, even Tarantino’s weaker efforts are very good movies. He’s chasing a level of greatness that’s impossible to manufacture, though, and he’s brought it all upon himself. By staking out his tenth flick as the be-all and end-all, the greatest obstacle facing whatever that film turns out to be is Tarantino himself.
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