Natural Born Killers

"Natural Born Killers"
Oliver Stone, 1994

Quentin Tarantino's story about a pair of psychotic lovers, Mickey Knox (an excellent Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis), going on a murderous rampage is fine, I suppose. His plot doesn't really offer us anything original or insightful, aside from providing the brief adrenaline rush that one attains from witnessing a murder on-screen. The problem with "Natural Born Killers" is that its director, Oliver Stone, shifts his focus away from the killers, and onto society's culpability in making them the monsters they are.

Stone's film features an odd mish-mash of visuals: smooth, normal-looking 35 mm shots, ultra-grainy black-and-white shots, animation, quick edits to horror-film visuals and to television shows, and lots of blown-out highlights. This is probably the only film where I find the cinematography by Robert Richardson, who shot "JFK," "Kill Bill," and "Platoon," distracting. His camera tends to revert to dutch angles, which looks cool the first dozen times we see this, but quickly grows gimicky.

Stone's other visuals fare just as poorly - at first, I thought that he was using such a schizophrenic assortment of visuals to relay the Knoxs' disturbed mental state. But since the film is presented in this manner the entire time, with no regard as to who the subject is, I'm going to venture a guess: Stone made this decision, not only because it looked "cool," but also because he wanted to suggest that society is responsible for cultivating these killers. The film only explores this issue in broad, clumsy strokes. Robert Downey, Jr., playing a reporter - to perfection, as always - who investigates mass murderers for a TV show, is supposed to be some kind of embodiment of the media being a disseminator of hatred and violence - how the media fulfills this role, exactly, is never satisfactorily explored.

The only time that Stone properly balances the combination of entertainment, horror, and preaching about media's evils occurs during an incredibly disturbing sequence where Mickey and Mallory's brutal murder of her abusive parents - one of whom is played, surprisingly, by Rodney Dangerfield - is depicted, visually and aurally, like a cheap sitcom airing on TV. This sequence, unlike the rest of the film, perfectly conveys the insanity of these two characters, who kill simply because they can and couldn't care less about the repercussions of their actions - in their minds, their lives are as meaningful as those of actors on a TV show. But at this point, I think I'm just bored with Tarantino-style ultra-violence, which combined with Stone's needless and poorly-executed preachiness, makes this film an insufferable experience.

Rating: 4

First Viewed: 7/7/08, on Blu-ray Disc
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