Natural Born Killers (1994)
Country: US
Technical: col 119m
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Juliette Lewis, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jnr, Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Sizemore
Synopsis:
A media pundit shadows a pair of violent sociopaths, and becomes implicated in their crimes. So are we?
Review:
An idea handled with a good deal more humour and incisiveness by the Belgian Man Bites Dog; Stone here gives it the signature sledgehammer treatment, and his frenetic editing and high-decibel aesthetic grow enervating after two hours. The film garnered a certain notoriety in the UK for its implicit acceptance of delinquent violence, thus missing the point: we were meant to question our own blithe tolerance of the same violence when perpetrated by our screen heroes, such as Arnie and the like. Alas, Stone's bombast was such that the tabloids were unsurprisingly distracted by the gaudy multi-media presentation, and the Bonnie and Clyde/Gun Crazy antecedents were a further red herring. This was film-making by numbers, based on an idea Tarantino peddled again with True Romance, and with cartoon performances out of a Batman movie. (All concerned, hang your heads in shame.) The fact that the movie has something to say about America's ongoing obsession with violence and self-destructive respect for gun-law does not make it fine cinema, and Stone himself had played the media satire card with Talk Radio.
Country: US
Technical: col 119m
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Juliette Lewis, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jnr, Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Sizemore
Synopsis:
A media pundit shadows a pair of violent sociopaths, and becomes implicated in their crimes. So are we?
Review:
An idea handled with a good deal more humour and incisiveness by the Belgian Man Bites Dog; Stone here gives it the signature sledgehammer treatment, and his frenetic editing and high-decibel aesthetic grow enervating after two hours. The film garnered a certain notoriety in the UK for its implicit acceptance of delinquent violence, thus missing the point: we were meant to question our own blithe tolerance of the same violence when perpetrated by our screen heroes, such as Arnie and the like. Alas, Stone's bombast was such that the tabloids were unsurprisingly distracted by the gaudy multi-media presentation, and the Bonnie and Clyde/Gun Crazy antecedents were a further red herring. This was film-making by numbers, based on an idea Tarantino peddled again with True Romance, and with cartoon performances out of a Batman movie. (All concerned, hang your heads in shame.) The fact that the movie has something to say about America's ongoing obsession with violence and self-destructive respect for gun-law does not make it fine cinema, and Stone himself had played the media satire card with Talk Radio.
Country: US
Technical: col 119m
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Juliette Lewis, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jnr, Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Sizemore
Synopsis:
A media pundit shadows a pair of violent sociopaths, and becomes implicated in their crimes. So are we?
Review:
An idea handled with a good deal more humour and incisiveness by the Belgian Man Bites Dog; Stone here gives it the signature sledgehammer treatment, and his frenetic editing and high-decibel aesthetic grow enervating after two hours. The film garnered a certain notoriety in the UK for its implicit acceptance of delinquent violence, thus missing the point: we were meant to question our own blithe tolerance of the same violence when perpetrated by our screen heroes, such as Arnie and the like. Alas, Stone's bombast was such that the tabloids were unsurprisingly distracted by the gaudy multi-media presentation, and the Bonnie and Clyde/Gun Crazy antecedents were a further red herring. This was film-making by numbers, based on an idea Tarantino peddled again with True Romance, and with cartoon performances out of a Batman movie. (All concerned, hang your heads in shame.) The fact that the movie has something to say about America's ongoing obsession with violence and self-destructive respect for gun-law does not make it fine cinema, and Stone himself had played the media satire card with Talk Radio.