Moustroll
Good movie but grossly overrated
Dynamixor
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Suman Roberson
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
a_chinn
Oliver Stone's indictment of the media told through the story of young lovers on the run, serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. Based on an early script by Quentin Tartantino, Tarantino took his name off of the film and instead asked for only a "story" credit. He's been quoted as saying if you love the film, that was Oliver, if you hated the film, that was Oliver, essentially disavowing the film, which I didn't really see why he'd want to distance himself from it at the time, but rewatching the film now, it was a smart move on his part to distance himself from this mess. I was shocked by how poorly this film has aged. It may be a case of it having been imitated so many times since then, both in terms of style and content, that the film has lost it's original impact; much like rewatching the original version of "The Exorcist" (thought that film is still good, it's just not as scary). After my disappointment re-watching this film, I got out my copy of Quentin Tarantino's original script and pretty much all of the moments in this film that do work were straight out of Tarantino's original version; a cool opening credits sequence with crazy rear projections, Robert Downy Jr. as a sensationalistic Geraldo-like TV news reporter, some sharp dialogue from from Tom Sizemore as Seymore Skagnetti and Tommy Lee Jones as Warden Dwight McClusky. When the film drifts into Stone's seeming obsession with Native American mysticism, indulgent mix media visuals (Rob Zombie used this same style to much better effect in his films), and everyone trying to out overact the person next to them ruins what could have been a tough, nihilistic young lovers on the run "Badlands" homage. Where I will give Stone credit is the casting of Rodney Dangerfield as Lewis' dad, in a flashback sequence to Mallory Knox's abusive dysfunctional home life prior to running off with Mickey, presented as a nightmarish sitcom from hell, complete with a laugh track that punctuates societal indifference to domestic atrocities. That was not in Tarantino's script and Rodney is a positively demonic and terrifying version of his usual comic on-screen persona. I'll also give Stone credit for a dynamite soundtrack (or at least for hiring Trent Reznor to produce the soundtrack) which includes Leonard Cohen, L7, Patti Smith, Duane Eddy, NIN, Cowby Junkies, Jane's Addiction, Barry Adamson, Lard, and many more. Downey, Sizemore, and particularly Jones seem to strike the best tone of giving completely over-the-top performances, but doing so without winking at the camera, which I think Stone allowed Harrelson and Lewis to do too often throughout the film. Sure the on- screen media frenzy surrounding Mickey and Mallory and their cult of personality was fed, created, and sustained by the media is Stone's major point of the film, but it makes the characters too much to take. You can catch glimpses of a good film every now and then, buried beneath Stone's sound and fury, but in general this film is a preachy, heavy-handed mess. Do yourself a favor and read Tarantino's original script instead of watching Oliver Stone's indulgent mess.
dratif
To me filmmaking is all about this film. My main inspiration as a filmmaker and a student. The hard work the audacity, the casting, performance, music- everything is just near perfect. The realism, surrealism, the art, technique, courage is just immaculate. Forever will be my inspiration, because of its multi-format sequences.
mistoppi
I rented the director's cut and I'm trying to figure out what's the difference between the cuts, apart from being four minutes longer. Anyway, since I have only seen this cut, so I'll just have to go with this one. I was mostly interested in this film because of the original script written by Tarantino. Apparently the original however was heavily edited by Veloz, Rutowski and Stone, so I don't know what parts of Tarantino are actually left. I'd really like to read the original script, but I don't know if that's even possible.My dad actually gave me a warning of this film. He said it was extremely heavy and distressing. It definitely is, and during some parts of the film it's done marvellously. The beginning of the film is a good example. The dialogue in that is pretty regular, it could be the beginning of any movie. The dialogue is something we could hear everyday, that's not what makes it distressing. That's done with the music. I've never liked Leonard Cohen's music, but it definitely spices up movies by making scenes extra creepy. I've had the soundtrack of this movie for a while, and most of the songs sounded extremely good, but when I saw the actual film I was slightly disappointed. Apart from few, like Leonard Cohen in the beginning, many of the tracks are easy to ignore, as they give nothing to the actual story. They just are playing in the background. If Tarantino had got to direct the movie his way, the soundtrack would've been so much better.Also the cinematography makes the film unnerving. Fast shots, camera is tilted, some shots are in black and white... Let alone all the small symbolic things in between what's actually happening. The writing could be almost anything, cinematography like that does everything else. I've seen the same kind of visual side in Slipstream (2007). That movie was complicated anyway, so the symbolic fast shots of something random suited the film. The plot of Natural Born Killers isn't complicated. All that symbolism gets lost when the film isn't watched by someone who actually knows about symbols. Everyday watchers won't have time to analyse what a snake here and there means. If Oliver Stone didn't mean this movie to be watched by someone who doesn't want to analyse every little detail as an important symbol, he's pretentious. The way this film was shot is good: tilted shots, fast shots, black and white shots, the colours... Those work. But like getting random shots of something isn't always that necessary. It's kind of like Stone wanted this film to be way more artistic than this plot could be. The story is artistic in the way how it can be analysed, but that's it. There's no need to make it an art film. I wanted to like this movie, but it's hard. While it had everything I usually like in films, it felt too pretentious and overtly complicated. I was expecting something so much simpler and therefore so much better. And that's the reason why I'd want to see what Tarantino originally had. He's an excellent writer, and I feel like his original story was made into something needlessly weird. When you think about it, Natural Born Killers is a good movie, if you judge it like critics do and all that. In technical sense it's excellent and all that, but it's annoying to watch. Natural Born Killers isn't something you can just throw into the DVD-player and watch it when you have nothing better to do, you have to really, really watch it, and that might ruin a film a little. If it's on TV, you can't just start in the middle if you missed the beginning and so on. While I appreciate what this film is, I can't say I actually like it.
mgtbltp
A surreal, satirical, Neo Noir, sensory overdose. A psychedelic, acid road trip to Hell. It's a bizarre black comedy satire of the American 24 hour news cycle celebrity/violence culture, much in the vein of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) satire of mutual assured destruction, and A Clockwork Orange (1971) satire of ultra violence. Believe it or not I'd never seen this film until last year. I hadn't even heard of the controversy surrounding the film. I can see why though. It's because it hits too close to home, it's too real, it touches a nerve, there's an inconvenient veracity of cause and effect to it all. Is it Nature, a frightening genetic component of human beings that is in all of us. Or is it Nurture, as is illustrated through the fragments of flashbacks we get of Mickeys and Mallory's abominable family life, that causes them to go off the rails, if the wrong code buttons are pushed? I've been going through the Neo Noir lists from various sources and either viewing or acquiring those titles that I'd either never heard of or just missed. I believe my experience of watching this was all that more enhanced since I've begun delving into Noir and Neo Noir so heavily. This personal steeping in everything Noir has given me a huge visual catalog of cinematic memory ripe for discharge. This film may not work the same going into it cold turkey. Natural Born Killers, gets my synapses sparking. My RPMs are red lining. Like a delayed strobe the film sporadically flashes between Black & White and Color film, it has these insanely canted Dutch Angles while at other times they tilt, back and forth, teeter-totter like along with other visual Noir stylistics. It uses documentary style footage and live breaking news parodies, animation, TV sit com satire, super 8 film sequences, TV quasi News Special Bulletins, and music video style promos. It is hyper violence mixed with cultural and natural Iconography all in a assault on the senses. Every potential affront to sanity and integrity is exploited. It's an indictment of the media feeding frenzy we have with disasters, mass murder, terrorist attacks, and public executions. It's INSANITY, with a complimentary soundtrack, and it's as American as apple pie. They got their kicks on Route 666. Our tale begins with the desert and a montage of natural born killers, a wolf, a rattler, a hawk, it then segues to the human kind. Natural Born Killers is full of these little "just killing", (as Donald Trump uses the phrase) picaresque noir vignettes and others, that flesh out the characters and propel the tale forward, that stick in my mind amidst all the designed chaos. Here is one can call Mallory The 1990s Femme Fatale, where a jealous Blondie-Mallory goes off half cocked away from Mickey. During a love making session Mickey is paying more attention to the pretty hostage they have tied up in their motel room that to her. Mallory ends up seducing a town pump gas jockey on the hood of a Corvette in the garage bay. She hops up on the hood of a Corvette Stingray and wants him to "go down". He starts to do so but loses control jumping up on her. Mallory frustrate-edly pushes him off pulls a revolver out of her bag and blows him away. She then grabs her shed panties and flings them at the corpse exclaiming "that was the worst head I ever got"! and stomps off. Other times these vignettes are just brief homages to the past cinema. When Mickey and Mallory are dancing at the diner the sequence changes from full traditional lit color to a silhouette reminiscent of Astaire & Rogers Musicals shot in low key chiaroscuro. We also see Horror and Monster movie clips. The vast pans of the Southwest deserts, and a prison farm escape during a Wizard of Oz tornado, recall countless Westerns. Again, over all, Natural Born Killers is not about Mickey and Mallory but about the infamy of their killing spree and the nutjobs they attract. A Geraldo Rivera inspired TV expose program American Mainiacs, is hosted by a shock journalist Wayne Gale who affects a Robin Leach accent and provides a live Lifestyles of the Depraved commentary on the hunt for Mickey and Mallory, their capture, trial and a year later on a prison riot. The program as Wayne Gale puts it is " for all the morons watching out there in zombieland." Tom Sizemore is Jack Scagnetti a high profile celebrity cop, author of "Scagnetti on Scagnetti" who is seriously warped. Tommy Lee Jones is redneck Prison Warden Dwight McClusky and Everett Quinton is Deputy Warden Wurlitzer who does a pretty good impression of Hugh Cronyn in Brute Force. You'll find yahoo's on either end of the spectrum will superficially either embrace this film for all the wrong reasons or condemn it, rather than see it for the statement it makes about the sick state of the media news cycle trap that feeds current society where even the really wicked sometimes, get off scot- free. Caution this film will not be for everyone. Artistically intellectualized chaos, everything is over the top in this film, what a trip 9/10
