← Back to Reviews
in
Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)
OK, I'm not going to get too-seriously into the details of the plot because if any film didn't really care about its plot, it's this flick. Basically, the characters played by Woody Harrelson and Juliete Lewis have been treated horrendously for most of their lives up until they meet, and afterwards, they decide (without much planning) to pay back the world for dealing them such a lousy start at life. Tarantino wrote a script, but by the time the whole thing was shot by Oliver Stone, it didn't especially resemble whatever Tarantino's points were. This is the movie which proves that Stone either suffers from major league ADHD and/or that he's a major league drug user who's equally "happy" with uppers and downers. For the first half of the film, there are rarely 20 seconds at a time where the photography isn't filtered or distorted, the acting isn't arch, the presentation isn't ostentatious and the soundtrack isn't overboard. Even so, if that all doesn't throw you off, the film is watchable in the same way a train wreck is, and then later on, when they end up in prison, it somehow gets calmer, even with Tommy Lee Jones playing a warden who'd make Two-Face seem catatonic and Robert Downey Jr. doing his Australian accent (trust me, Downey's Sherlock Holmes is much-more nuanced). Sometimes I find this film to be bravura and other times I just think it's an older child masturbating in public. Somehow, I still believe my rating to be correct.
OK, I'm not going to get too-seriously into the details of the plot because if any film didn't really care about its plot, it's this flick. Basically, the characters played by Woody Harrelson and Juliete Lewis have been treated horrendously for most of their lives up until they meet, and afterwards, they decide (without much planning) to pay back the world for dealing them such a lousy start at life. Tarantino wrote a script, but by the time the whole thing was shot by Oliver Stone, it didn't especially resemble whatever Tarantino's points were. This is the movie which proves that Stone either suffers from major league ADHD and/or that he's a major league drug user who's equally "happy" with uppers and downers. For the first half of the film, there are rarely 20 seconds at a time where the photography isn't filtered or distorted, the acting isn't arch, the presentation isn't ostentatious and the soundtrack isn't overboard. Even so, if that all doesn't throw you off, the film is watchable in the same way a train wreck is, and then later on, when they end up in prison, it somehow gets calmer, even with Tommy Lee Jones playing a warden who'd make Two-Face seem catatonic and Robert Downey Jr. doing his Australian accent (trust me, Downey's Sherlock Holmes is much-more nuanced). Sometimes I find this film to be bravura and other times I just think it's an older child masturbating in public. Somehow, I still believe my rating to be correct.