NATURAL BORN KILLERS
A film review by Vijay Ramanujan
Copyright 1994 Vijay Ramanujan
Micky Knox: Woody Harrelson Mallory Knox: Juliette Lewis Wayne Gale: Robert Downey Junior Also: Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield
The plot: Two psychos ride around killing people. No one's chasing them. No one really seems to care that they exist. Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot. They were both abused as children, but mostly in black and white. A newsman wants to interview them and a prison warden wanders around looking confused and sounding threatening, but not really saying much worth remembering. Lots of people get shot, some people get stabbed, and some people even get punched to death. Hitler marches on Poland. Don't ask.
For years I have wondered how reviewers can pan a movie and give it ratings of 1.5/4 or 2/5. NATURAL BORN KILLERS provides the answer. You must leave room on the bottom end of the scale for movies this bad. When it comes to ratings, NATURAL BORN KILLERS pretty much defines the 0.
First the positive. Juliette Lewis salvages a part clearly written by either two different people or by a schizophrenic. She is bashful, wicked, pleasant, cruel, harmless and vulnerable. Yet, somehow, she pulls it off. Robert Downey Junior is great as a pyshotic telejournalist who plans to make a bundle off of this pair of maniacs by manipulating their image and interviewing them live. Soundtrack was nice, and I saw it at a discount theater. Not much else to say here.
Now the negative.
Where to start? When Janet Maslin said that this movie relied on sophistry more than poetry, she hit the nail on the head. The main goal of this movie seems to be to prove to us what a great artist Oliver Stone is. He seems to have deluded himself into thinking that if he can throw a million visuals at us in two hours, he has proven himself to be the greatest director alive. Only the strong will survive. Unfortunately, in trying to meet this aim, he overlooked the portion of the director's handbook which dealt with relevancy. Why do we see Hitler's army marching in the background while Micky and Mallory have sex? Why is it necessary for Micky to watch the Oliver Stone penned (and offensively racist) MIDNIGHT EXPRESS? Who came up with the idea of showing Mallory's breasts while Micky talks about why he is a killer? And what do the damn Coca-Cola polar bears have to do with anything? A lack of visual coherency doomed this movie from the start. The visual elements rarely coincided with the thematic elements in the movie. Truly adept directors can carry off the odd visuals (David Lynch, Tim Burton, Barry Levinson in TOYS) by making them a part of the movie. Stone did not do this.
The second major failing of the movie was its basic pointlessness. My first, second and third reactions after seeing this movie were "Who cares?", "Why did I pay to see this?" and "Can I get my money back?" I am hoping, for Oliver Stone's sake, that this was not a satire. It did not have the wit, the sarcasm, the subtlety or the bite of good satire. In fact, there was nothing in the movie that I could latch onto as satire at all, except by the loosened definition of satire that Oliver Stone seems to have hinted at in his interviews and articles surrounding this movie.
If it is not satire, what is it? A powerful drama? No, then it would have been KALIFORNIA, a much better movie with a similar plot (but no media types involved). What that movie achieved through stark realism and tight story-telling this movie loses in a diarrhetic wash of tasteless jokes and pointless violence. It fails as an indictment of the media through medium more than anything else. He is fighting fire with fire, trying to criticize the media's sensationalistic commercialism and sensory overkill through sensationalistic commercialism and sensory overkill. History has taught us that if the media is to blame, than Oliver Stone is the guiltiest of all. He seems to criticize the media for creating murderer celebrities. Well, he has just created two more. Offensive would be a mild word to use here, but isn't that half of what the goal was? At least I'm talking about it, right?
Now, I shouldn't delude you into thinking that if those problems had been cleared up that this would have been a good movie. In truly great movies of this kind, there is an element of suspense. This didn't have one. The portion of the movie dealing with the killings has all the suspense of the baseball negotiations. We know what's going to happen, and frankly, we aren't given much to care about either way. Only one victim is on screen long enough to become something more than another body to be thrown at the front row patrons, and even he is reduced to another stereotypical portrait of the wise old native. The only tension between our two leads surrounds the fruitless question "Do you think I'm sexy?" This of course leads to some wonderfully amateurish dialogue that any twelve-year-old will get a kick out of. There is no element of chase, as the lawmen only enter the movie seconds before the Knoxs are captured. Once the murderers are captured, the movie only goes further downhill. There is no sane character to offset the insanity of the leads. There is no conflict, as no one seems to really be plotting towards any kind of an end. (Let alone the screenwriter or director.) There is no drama, because all realism has been cast aside. There is nothing much to hand onto, and nothing much worth watching. This is not a movie ruined by bad decisions, but a movie that should never have been made, made worse by all the stupidity displayed by director, editor et al.
But this movie does one positive thing. It has added one more rule to the list of rules that govern action/adventure movies. Policemen must count to ten and sing the national anthem silently before firing on an armed and dangerous criminal who has just started a killing spree. Yes, that's right, with a half a dozen or more guns pointed at his head, our unarmed "hero" ... well, I'll leave you to guess. Need a hint?
So what was the point of this movie? Abused children lose all sense of right and wrong? It's all because of Geraldo? That with enough hype you can people to see just about any crap that you throw onto the big screen? I myself am thinking that it is probably the last one.
0.01/10 I'm in a generous mood.
And just wondering. Anyone else bothered that Stone used the clip of O. J. before the man has even had a trial? I guess that makes O. J. a NATURAL BORN KILLER. Trial by Oliver Stone? Even the Puritans would have flinched at the thought.
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