This is... wild. 'Once Upon A Crime (2023)' is a spin on the classic Cinderella tale that asks the age old question: "what if Red Riding Hood was in this and she was a detective who became involved in uncovering the truth behind the murder of a royal hairdresser?". Just a classic "what if?" situation, really. What starts out feeling like it's for five-year-old children soon takes a bit of a (seemingly unintentional) turn as it tosses a dead body into the mix and just keeps getting more sinister from there. It's not as if it ever switches gears entirely into grown-up territory, but it definitely starts to veer away from what initially seems to be its target audience (while, at the same time, kind of playing exclusively to it).
The whodunnit is a colourful, camp pantomime that lacks any real semblance of cinema and feels as though it belongs on a cheap kids channel but is also kind of weirdly awesome in its own way. It's essentially the wildest case Phoenix Wright never took on, feeling like a JRPG in the best ways possible. Honestly, I kind of like a lot of it. It's never exactly good in any real sense of the word, but it undeniably has this strangely compelling quality that keeps you floating in the space between bemusement and boredom for its majority. If you take it for what it is, there's some genuine - if slight - enjoyment to be had.
And then there's the ending. I don't really want to spoil anything - well I do, but I don't think I should - so all I'll say is that it wraps up in an incredibly frustrating way and treats a particular like absolute dirt even as it establishes that they didn't really do anything wrong (mistakes were made, sure, but the lack of sympathy here is appalling) and that they're every bit as poorly treated yet genuinely lovely as they first appear to be (even though they did something bad, they clearly aren't a bad person). It just leaves an awful taste in your mouth because you can tell the movie itself doesn't think it's doing anyone a disservice, which further reinforces the implication that the story's classist messaging isn't exactly an accident (even if its meek final moments seem to be an effort to prove that it's actually against the classist attitudes its characters hold). The ending drops the ball so badly that it actively affects how I rate the overall movie.
Ultimately, although there is some fun to be had here and there, this is a bizarre and generally quite bad picture that totally botches its ending. I must say, though, that its fairy tale costuming is absolutely heavenly.
