Review: Natural Born Killers

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play lovers and killers on a cross-country killing spree that earns them media attention and cult status, adored by the public as anti-heroes. Uh-huh. Aussie-accented schlocky crime TV host Wayne Gayle (Robert Downey Jr.) is on their trail, seeing dollar signs and ratings bonanza in them. Meanwhile, tracking them down is seedy, limelight-loving cop Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), who doesn’t seem much better than the sicko killers he’s chasing. Tommy Lee Jones turns up as a sadistic, ridiculously coiffed warden, Rodney Dangerfield and Edie McClurg are Lewis’ grotesque parents, and James Gammon appears briefly as a victim.

 

Controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone (“Platoon”, “Born on the 4^th of July”, “JFK”, “W.”) has had a seriously erratic career, but this over-the-top 1994 wannabe media satire/road movie/serial killer character study is him hitting rock bottom. No wonder writer Quentin Tarantino (who would make his popular “Pulp Fiction” the same year) has attempted to distance himself from what ended up on screen. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, if Stone’s point is to criticise the media’s glorification and fascination with serial killers, well, he has fouled it up. For starters, you’re making a movie about it, Mr. Stone. An ultra-violent one that in my view ultimately glorifies or at least glamorises this stuff for the most part. Hypocrite much? If you were to read this film’s message without any prior knowledge of what its supposed message was, you’d swear that Stone and QT (who only gets story credit here) thought that the media’s glamorisation of murder and crime was totally awesome, dude. If Stone wants us to see any of this in a negative light, well he has succeeding in making a shithouse film, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

 

A combination of Juliette Lewis being Juliette Lewis (in what is her third film seemingly inspired by the infamous Starkweather-Fugate killing spree after “Kalifornia” and “Too Young to Die”, both co-starring Brad Pitt) and Robert Downey Jr. supposedly mangling an Aussie accent resulted in me waiting 19 years to get around to seeing this film, and now I have...well, I’ve heard worse Aussie accents in my time. In fact, he almost sorta nails it on a couple of occasions. Yep, that’s it for praise here, folks. I shouldn’t have bothered seeing it at all.

 

I’m sure Stone’s aggressive, overly fancy style will be some people’s cup of tea, but I truly loathed it. In order to make his points, Stone and the normally very fine cinematographer Robert Richardson (“Platoon”, “Born on the 4^th of July”, “JFK”) simply bombard the viewer with arty, hyperreal images and sounds, thinking that merely inserting TV and music references into scenes and very occasionally subverting them, is somehow profound. It’s not, and all it does is annoy the viewer after about five minutes, and slow the narrative down to a crawl. I was watching this film around the time of the Oscar Pistorius murder case, which was on several TV channels, whilst “Capturing the Friedmans” was on another. Flipping between those two things one night kinda made Stone’s point a lot more cohesively than this entire film does. It’s the rock bottom of MTV-inspired filmmaking, and plays exactly like it sounds: Oliver Stone doing a Tarantino movie. It’s ugly and unrestrained.

 

Stone eventually gets around to making his point (the media glamorising violent killers) in the second half of the film, but it’s too late. The first half completely negates anything said in the second half by glorifying it all so that the film ultimately isn’t commenting on our desire for media-glorified stories of violence, it’s giving us a media-glorified story of violence. That’s not the same thing, I’m afraid. I guess Stone thinks that only some media glamorisation is a bad thing and his films in particular are free from criticism. Um...no, Oliver. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in blaming films for real-life violence (something needs to be wrong in a person’s head to begin with), but if you’re gonna make a film that attacks the media for idolising killers, don’t make it look sexy, you idiot. The ending definitely suggests that the film is anything but a criticism of media violence and is absolutely reprehensible. Having said that, time has been kind to the violence in the film itself. It’s no longer shocking, so I guess there’s that going for it. I’ve heard Stone’s initial idea for the film was a more traditional, if light-hearted action blockbuster. Make of that what you will.

 

And why is some of this in B&W? Because Stone can, that’s why. Ditto the animation sequence. Yes, an animation sequence. It certainly doesn’t worry about being consistent with its camera POVs and faux-documentary style. I mean, is it a ‘found footage’ film? Faux-documentary? Who is the cameraman, then? It’s like no thought has gone into the logic of it. Meanwhile, Juliette Lewis plays a slightly less trashy and slightly more psychotic variant on her performance in “Kalifornia”, merely riffing on the one-note she knows how to play (except she doesn’t know how to play it), which sums up her entire career, really. Even the talented Woody Harrelson is having an off day here in an uninteresting performances. And why does Lewis insist on singing? She has even less vocal ability than Courtney Love. Perhaps worst of all, though, is Academy Award winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, whose performance here is probably his nadir. Certainly it’s a waste of his time and talent, and I felt rather embarrassed for him. He actually seems to be acting in a completely different, more comical film. Not funny, but more comical. Once he turns up, though, the film has truly become a wretched mess. It stops being so much about the two killers and being more about Downey, Jones, and Sizemore. Downey in particular is over-indulged by Mr. Stone. And if anyone can tell me what was the point of the trippy peyote freak-out scene with the late Russell Means...um, nah, keep it to yourself. I bet Means had no idea what film he was in.

 

When a relatively serious Rodney Dangerfield is your best and only commendable element, you know you’ve made one of the worst films of all-time. But even Dangerfield’s scenes are kinda stupid, playing like a David Lynch (“Blue Velvet”) version of “The Honeymooners”, complete with gaudy colours and a laugh track, but without any true wit. Still, Dangerfield is quite nasty and well-cast (To what end?). Meanwhile, it’s quite sad to see Tom Sizemore looking younger and reasonably healthy in this. The next few years were seriously up-and-down for him. The guy does have talent, even if this film is far from the best showcase for that talent. And hey, don’t he and Downey look like jokes for appearing in this given their off-screen troubles after this film?

 

This is one of the worst films I’ve seen in my life, and features just about everything I hate in cinema, including characters with no redeeming or interesting qualities, Juliette Lewis’ abysmal singing, and some truly ridiculous and pointless tinted lenses. Don’t worry, I won’t go on one of my patented colour filter rants, you know the drill by now. Oh, and as far as I’m concerned, a little Leonard Cohen goes...not very far. A lot goes...nowhere. Based (well, kinda) on a story by Quentin Tarantino, the screenplay is by Richard Rutowski, David Veloz, and Stone himself. And yet no one between the four of them could manage to make anything cohesive or coherent out of it, apparently writing some of it during production. I’ve read that the film’s editing process was 11 months, which is ridiculous considering it still barely makes any damn sense. At the end of the day, whatever Stone’s message, his methods contradict it, making the film a horrible, putrid mess.

 

Rating: F