NATURAL BORN KILLERS
A film review by David Cowen
Copyright 1994 David Cowen
I have one piece of advice for those who want to see NATURAL BORN KILLERS:
Don't go on a full stomach.
No, it's not any amount of excessive violence that will turn your stomach.
No, it's not Juliette Lewis' dancing, straight out of ORGY OF THE DEAD.
No, it's not even Robert Downey Junior's disgustingly pretentious accent.
It's the 45-degree camera angles. If you get even slightly seasick, you probably won't make it 10 minutes into the dizzying camera work, the jump cuts, the different film stocks, the discrete stereo effects, the endless back-projecting and the color tinting. I guarantee it will make you at least slightly physically ill.
Oliver Stone has been trying for years to become Hollywood's premier mainstream "avant-garde" director. But face it, JFK and Wild Palms were just too NORMAL, too well regarded, too typical and, dare say it, dry. It looked as if Stone would never be able to wrest the belt away from David Lynch, even with Lynch's recent failures.
Then Stone had an idea: re-make WILD AT HEART. Put in a hint of what appears on the surface as media satire (so the media will love it, of course), and stir the whole brew up with more cuts-per-minute than the average MTV promo. What we're left with is a bad remake of Wild At Heart, a very, very weak attempt at satire, and a style of directing that will batter you with images so quickly and furiously that you won't have time to think.
YOU WON'T HAVE TIME TO THINK.
Stone throws in so many purely-for-show elements, the main offender being relentless back-projection, that you won't notice that the film doesn't have a plot. A typical scene from the film featured Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), the celebrated mass murderers, looking for snake-bite ointment.
They go into a drug store, which has no people in it.
The drug store is lit entirely in lime-green neon, with pink glowing skeletons at the end of every shelf. Each aisle's contents are also labeled in Asian lettering, for no apparent reason.
The store's HUGE "snake-bite ointment section" is out of ointment.
So, they kill the store's sole worker when he realizes who they are and alerts the cops.
Then, when police show up, an Asian film crew arrives, the female reporter spouting vaguely phallic comments like "He has a very big gun!" and "He has been rendered impotent!" Juliette Lewis sings a few bars of These Boots are Made for Walking, a copy joins in on the "bew, bew, bew" part. Signs in the background sport witty comments about barbiturates and other drugs, the most puzzling being a sign that says solely "PATRICIDE: DARKNESS"
It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, kids, but it all comes rushing at you so fast you won't care. Media pundits have spouted off about how much NATURAL BORN KILLERS is a scathing satire on the American media preoccupation with serial killers: the final few shots of the film (of Tonya Harding, OJ, the other easy targets) would have you think that's what Stone had in mind. But the film's philosophical centerpiece, a head-to-head interview between the host of "American Maniacs" (Robert Downey Junior) and Mickey.
It attempts to make a statement about either the "media feeding frenzy" of public morals, or about the fact that humans are predisposed to kill for their livelihood (to the level of animals and vegetation for food). But it's only a shouting match between two lame-brains, both of whose ideas are totally idiotic.
Possibly the most puzzling aspect of the film is its attack on egoism. The script attacks two of the supporting characters, the "American Maniacs" host and the cop who arrests Mickey and Mallory, for having unrelenting egoism, wanting to have their names on everything. Is Stone trying to redeem himself, or doesn't he realize his hypocrisy?
The constant diarrhea of images is no clue as to what Stone was thinking either. The images seem to have a small amount of meaning based in the context of the film, but that's it. I mean, for chrissakes, a little subliminal guy in a devil outfit pops up in jump cuts throughout the film.
The only people who manage to maintain their dignity throughout this mess are Woody Harrelson and Rodney Dangerfield--Woody's controlled demeanor offsets the glut of overacting in the rest of the film, and Rodney Dangerfield is just, well, perfect in his role (at least that's how I always imagined him). Everyone else seems to react to the film's amateurish overproduction with glee, and they all ham it up.
Oliver Stone is living out a film-school fantasy. He's made a big budget picture full of images, ideas, and commentary that add up to the same sort of absolutely nothing that most student films display. Stone wants so bad to be innovative that instead of using film production technology to make a point, he uses it purely to show what film production technology can do.
Out of 10: I'm going to be nice, simply because the film didn't *bore* me. Stone was obviously working hard at creating an interesting, innovative picture, which is much more than you can say about most of Hollywood. It's a pity that he can't make a *good* picture. I give it a 4.
esch@mixcom.com (Eschatfische!)
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