Like being on long-haul flight 'Once upon a time' gradually erases the past and a sense of purpose inside a compressed space where the inflight movie consists of tracking shots of 50 year old cars on LA freeways with contemporary pop music. In between, the dramatic action is provided by actors who cruise, chew the fat, and utter prosaic lines in a knowing way.

It's then you wished you'd packed some good books, for example, books on cinema, semiotics and pop culture because it borrows, poaches and re-uses ideas and tropes which have been employed elsewhere and always in more incisive ways.

The era is observed through a Warholian gaze of banality: the TV shows, the songs, the mundane utterances of no interest, which are crafted like TV adverts i.e. a dumb slogan or assertion. Bereft of creative ideas the only strategy is to repeat, and once scaled up, the entire fraud almost resembles something like another better film.

People driving cars are not inherently interesting, nor are their faces, not even with the winking use of a song over the image. Do it over and over, pastiche the era, and perhaps it's a style. Or not.

In any case, it's a trick any film school neophyte can do and upload. And pastiche is something any artist can do before they generate the real work. Mannerists do this: take a previous idea and echo it with minor nuances, strive for an ironic mode because that looks clever. It does to the perpetrator, anyway, though the audience has already seen the con.

Al Pacino said in a recent interview that he does bad movies in the hope that they might lift and, at the very least, become mediocre. With this movie he may have attained that goal, though that is no concession, or pleasure, for the rest of us.