Natural Born Killers (1994)

Directed by Oliver Stone. Starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Russell Means, O-Lan Jones, Edie McClurg, Balthazar Getty, Melinda Renna, Kirk Baltz, Lanny Flaherty, Arliss Howard, Steven Wright. [R]

In-your-face satire of the media feeding on the public’s fascination with criminal outcasts by glorifying the exploits of a pair of psychotic mass murderers, Mickey and Mallory Knox (Harrelson, Lewis), who blaze a blood-soaked trail through the American Southwest. Corrosive and bludgeoning bombast (though curiously inconclusive), its jarring edits/inserts and psychedelic visuals take their toll after a while, only occasionally serving the scene in a creative or productive way—the sequences with Dangerfield doing a reprehensibly abusive “sitcom dad” are rather brilliant, though. Long before the end, it’s simply an exhausting experience, and drained of new ideas; each haphazard swipe at a secondary social position from director/co-scripter Stone is little more than, as Mickey Knox would declare, “a statement…[but he’s] not 100% sure what it’s saying.” Radical but self-conscious, viscerally potent but intellectually shopworn, very violent but overly stylized about it (and, therefore, softened), it’s a frothing madhouse of highs and lows that’s easy to applaud for intent but hard to embrace for content. Most of the cast ravenously chew the scenery to a dulling effect—Jones is arguably even more over-the-top here as a prison warden than he would be next year as Two-Face in Batman Forever! Story credited to Quentin Tarantino, whose original script was changed so drastically that he wound up disowning the film.

61/100