Director Oliver Stone's incredibly wild take on Quentin Tarantino's story is a candy store full of surreal images, soundtrack choices, film clips, newsreel footage, and satire. It's not going to be for every taste, as ultimately it's such an attack on the senses that it becomes a little numbing. It takes jabs at a number of aspects of pop culture, specifically the way that certain media types conduct themselves, how they and the public make celebrities out of criminals, and the utter fascination held for certain crazed individuals. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis have two of the best roles of their careers as Mickey and Mallory, two lovers, each coming from traumatic backgrounds, who fatefully meet and celebrate their union by going on a spree of mass murder. Robert Downey, Jr. is Wayne Gale, the tabloid journalist with a sensational TV program who's determined to capitalize on their infamy. Tom Sizemore and Tommy Lee Jones contribute truly over the top supporting performances, and many familiar faces appear in roles both big and small. Stone experiments with all sorts of styles and goes for dutch angles at many different points, but there are times when the weirdness is reigned in somewhat and the story becomes more straightforward. Still, things get cranked up to a high level for the climactic prison riot, of which Mickey and Mallory take full advantage. Perhaps the oddest moment in the whole thing is the way that Mallory's demented home life is presented in the style of a sitcom, laugh track and everything, with none other than Rodney Dangerfield as her ultra creepy dad. (Director Stone's son Sean plays Mallory's brother in this sequence.) The tone is set right up front as Mickey and Mallory raise Hell in a diner and things stay, let's say, *interesting*, for about two hours. Particularly potent is the jail house interview with Mickey and Wayne, modelled after the Geraldo Rivera / Charles Manson interview. Of course, this also works as a love story - a thoroughly unconventional one - but a love story just the same, and after all the digs the movie takes at various subjects, it doesn't go for a safe, Hollywood style resolution. There are no "good" or purely "bad" characters here; everybody's got their flaws in this story. Continuing the tradition of law breaking lovers also portrayed in films such as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Badlands", "Natural Born Killers" is definitely something one doesn't just watch but experience. And when it's all over, it's not something easily forgotten. Seven out of 10.
Review of Natural Born Killers
