(Bloomberg) — The most hotly anticipated title at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival was without a doubt Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Hoping to get into the first press screening ahead of its world premiere on Tuesday evening, journalists waited in line for upwards of three hours, with several hundred ending up shut out of the 1,068-seat theater where it was held.

The already vigorous buzz had only intensified on Monday morning, after Tarantino posted an open letter on the film’s official Twitter page, asking those attending the festival not to divulge any details “that would prevent later audiences from experiencing the film in the same way [as them].”

The unveiling of Tarantino’s ninth film coincides with the 25th anniversary of the premiere of his second, Pulp Fiction, which also had a Cannes premiere.

Pulp Fiction’s eventual victory as the winner of the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize and arguably a more prestigious honor than the Oscar for Best Picture, paved the way for the then-31-year-old to become one of the most popular and iconic directors in contemporary cinema.

Tarantino’s success, however, is inseparable from the figure of Harvey Weinstein. Their relationship began at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, when Weinstein’s former company Miramax bought the distribution rights to Tarantino’s debut, Reservoir Dogs.

Weinstein was then intimately involved in the production of all his subsequent films, to the point that detractors have accused the director of being a product of the famously domineering producer.

When reports first came out in July 2017 that Tarantino’s next project would be a film about the Manson Family, a 1960s cult who went on a killing spree, Weinstein was still involved. Three months later, the New York Times published detailed allegations of Weinstein’s extended history of sexual assault, triggering one of the biggest scandals in Hollywood history, and soon thereafter Tarantino cut ties with his former mentor.

It’s therefore inevitable that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be judged in light of Tarantino’s newfound independence. Disappointingly, the director’s first post-Weinstein film is strikingly bland.

The Manson Family are actually only a secondary part of the plot, and they don’t make an appearance until about halfway. For most of its 165-minute running time, the film focuses on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a famous actor whose career is in a downward spiral, and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), his personal stuntman, chauffeur, and devoted friend.

However, since Rick lives next door to Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and the story takes place in 1969, the year Tate was brutally murdered during a home invasion by Charles Manson’s (Damon Herriman) followers, it’s signaled from the start that the Family will eventually feature in some prominent way.

Until the gruesome finale, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is uncharacteristically free of violence. There isn’t much in the way of narrative, either.

For the most part, Rick is shown at work on the shoot of a terrible-looking Western TV show or drinking his professional woes away at his villa in the Hollywood Hills, while Cliff drives Rick’s Cadillac around sunny Los Angeles running errands for him. At intervals, the movie checks in on Tate. Given that she doesn’t get up to much other than attend a screening of The Wrecking Crew, a film the real Tate acted in, these scenes seem mostly designed to remind us that she exists while the narrative meanders its way to the conclusion.

More than anything, the film provides an opportunity for Tarantino to wax nostalgic about the world of old-school Hollywood studio sets in meticulous, fetishistic detail.

Although there’s some enjoyment to be had in watching DiCaprio dress up in silly costumes and pretend he’s a second-rate actor, the meta-humor is nowhere near as funny as Tarantino thinks it is. The shoot scenes drag on for far too long, and even his usually popping dialogue falls oddly flat this time around. The man who once wrote a riveting scene around what a Big Mac is called in France is here reduced to giving a character the sobriquet Pussycat just so he can have Cliff spin an obvious joke from the first half of her name.

The cast includes a slew of famous actors beyond those already mentioned, including Al Pacino as a producer, Lena Dunham and Dakota Fanning as Manson girls, Kurt Russell as another stuntman, Luke Perry as a fellow actor on Rick’s show, Emile Hirsch as Tate’s former lover Jay Sebring, and Bruce Dern as George Spahn, the man who let the Manson Family live on his ranch. As each of them gets but a few minutes of screen time, however, they don’t actually add much of value beyond providing another name to put on the poster.

When the story reaches its much-anticipated denouement, it’s finally revealed what all Tarantino’s fuss over spoilers was about. Since only gimmicky films can be ruined with a spoiler, maybe Tarantino should have focused on giving the viewer more reason to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood other than to find out what happens at the end.