NATURAL BORN KILLERS
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1994 Jon A. Webb
NATURAL BORN KILLERS is being billed as the most violent thing you've ever seen, the most shocking of the Oliver Stone films, etc., but I didn't find it so. Perhaps I'm just becoming jaded, but I found Stone's editing technique, in which no shot is more than about two seconds long, to be distancing. I walked out of PLATOON in the village scene; it seemed to me that Stone was showing violence just for its sensational effect. Here, perhaps, he is trying to do the same thing but he has over-edited the film, with the result that one sees it as a movie rather than the commentary on our culture that it evidently tries to be.
Stone's films take a controversial stand, which helps marketing. Thus, JFK asserted a particularly unlikely version of the Kennedy assassination myth, and Stone extended it in a kind of performance art, going on talk shows to claim he really believed it. BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY turned a bitter Vietnam vet's tragic story into a condemnation of the Veteran's administration, US policy in Vietnam, etc. NATURAL BORN KILLERS claims that we have been so desensitized by television that we would accept truly evil people as national heroes.
Woody Harrelson is quite good as the murdering duo. I liked Harrelson particularly, as he drawls and slouches his way through the part. He seems deeply relaxed and comfortable with his character.
Against this, Juliette Lewis seems weak, except in a few scenes where her anger explodes; she's great in the fight scenes, and while dancing. But I did not think she carried the weight of her role very well; I still can't decide if she was meant to be a moral zero into which Harrelson's character poured his evil, or the catalyst for his transformation.
The scenes with Rodney Dangerfield are probably the best of the film, and make its point most clearly. In fact, I think Dangerfield would have destroyed his career with this part, if he had done it earlier. (Dangerfield's character is just too close to his comic personality for comfort.) It is a parody of a TV show, with laugh track, etc., but Dangerfield plays a sickeningly evil father, abusing Lewis's character and the rest of his family.
There's a little too much (any is too much) of the Oliver Stone trademark American Indian mysticism here, as there was in THE DOORS.
Robert Downey, Jr. is great as tabloid TV reporter with the voice of Robin Leach (I wonder if they made a deal with Leach, or is he suing?) who makes the murderers into stars.
This film forms a natural end (hopefully) to Stone's indictment of American culture. It is an attack on television style sensationalization of murderers, etc., which in itself extends that sensationalization. I don't think Stone could go much farther with this point; like overbeaten egg whites this film falls flat. He'll have to think of something original to do next.
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