Natural Born Killers (1994)

While I like Oliver Stone theme of the movie "society's view of murderers" I can barely even tell you what the movies about or have any words for it. Woody harelson is such a great actor but that's basically all this movie has. I was so thankful when this movie ended. Would not recommend or watch. And yes I registered my email just to write this lol

This movie is one of the all time greats. It is a work of art that I'm glad exists. Lovely acting by all. Juliette Lewis, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr.,Tom Sizemore,Ed Wilson, O-Lan Jones and most of all Tommy Lee Jones.Great work by the director. The shots, black-and-white, surveillance video, garishly colored psychedelia, and even animation. It adds depth to the theme and represents more than the literal meaning.A must watch.My rating - 10

A surreal, satirical, Neo Noir, sensory overdose. A psychedelic, acid road trip to Hell. It's a bizarre black comedy satire of the American 24 hour news cycle celebrity/violence culture, much in the vein of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) satire of mutual assured destruction, and A Clockwork Orange (1971) satire of ultra violence. Believe it or not I'd never seen this film until last year. I hadn't even heard of the controversy surrounding the film. I can see why though. It's because it hits too close to home, it's too real, it touches a nerve, there's an inconvenient veracity of cause and effect to it all. Is it Nature, a frightening genetic component of human beings that is in all of us. Or is it Nurture, as is illustrated through the fragments of flashbacks we get of Mickeys and Mallory's abominable family life, that causes them to go off the rails, if the wrong code buttons are pushed? I've been going through the Neo Noir lists from various sources and either viewing or acquiring those titles that I'd either never heard of or just missed. I believe my experience of watching this was all that more enhanced since I've begun delving into Noir and Neo Noir so heavily. This personal steeping in everything Noir has given me a huge visual catalog of cinematic memory ripe for discharge. This film may not work the same going into it cold turkey. Natural Born Killers, gets my synapses sparking. My RPMs are red lining. Like a delayed strobe the film sporadically flashes between Black & White and Color film, it has these insanely canted Dutch Angles while at other times they tilt, back and forth, teeter-totter like along with other visual Noir stylistics. It uses documentary style footage and live breaking news parodies, animation, TV sit com satire, super 8 film sequences, TV quasi News Special Bulletins, and music video style promos. It is hyper violence mixed with cultural and natural Iconography all in a assault on the senses. Every potential affront to sanity and integrity is exploited. It's an indictment of the media feeding frenzy we have with disasters, mass murder, terrorist attacks, and public executions. It's INSANITY, with a complimentary soundtrack, and it's as American as apple pie. They got their kicks on Route 666. Our tale begins with the desert and a montage of natural born killers, a wolf, a rattler, a hawk, it then segues to the human kind. Natural Born Killers is full of these little "just killing", (as Donald Trump uses the phrase) picaresque noir vignettes and others, that flesh out the characters and propel the tale forward, that stick in my mind amidst all the designed chaos. Here is one can call Mallory The 1990s Femme Fatale, where a jealous Blondie-Mallory goes off half cocked away from Mickey. During a love making session Mickey is paying more attention to the pretty hostage they have tied up in their motel room that to her. Mallory ends up seducing a town pump gas jockey on the hood of a Corvette in the garage bay. She hops up on the hood of a Corvette Stingray and wants him to "go down". He starts to do so but loses control jumping up on her. Mallory frustrate-edly pushes him off pulls a revolver out of her bag and blows him away. She then grabs her shed panties and flings them at the corpse exclaiming "that was the worst head I ever got"! and stomps off. Other times these vignettes are just brief homages to the past cinema. When Mickey and Mallory are dancing at the diner the sequence changes from full traditional lit color to a silhouette reminiscent of Astaire & Rogers Musicals shot in low key chiaroscuro. We also see Horror and Monster movie clips. The vast pans of the Southwest deserts, and a prison farm escape during a Wizard of Oz tornado, recall countless Westerns. Again, over all, Natural Born Killers is not about Mickey and Mallory but about the infamy of their killing spree and the nutjobs they attract. A Geraldo Rivera inspired TV expose program American Mainiacs, is hosted by a shock journalist Wayne Gale who affects a Robin Leach accent and provides a live Lifestyles of the Depraved commentary on the hunt for Mickey and Mallory, their capture, trial and a year later on a prison riot. The program as Wayne Gale puts it is " for all the morons watching out there in zombieland." Tom Sizemore is Jack Scagnetti a high profile celebrity cop, author of "Scagnetti on Scagnetti" who is seriously warped. Tommy Lee Jones is redneck Prison Warden Dwight McClusky and Everett Quinton is Deputy Warden Wurlitzer who does a pretty good impression of Hugh Cronyn in Brute Force. You'll find yahoo's on either end of the spectrum will superficially either embrace this film for all the wrong reasons or condemn it, rather than see it for the statement it makes about the sick state of the media news cycle trap that feeds current society where even the really wicked sometimes, get off scot- free. Caution this film will not be for everyone. Artistically intellectualized chaos, everything is over the top in this film, what a trip 9/10

I was really looking forward to this one. The opening diner scene is unpredictably violent and edgy. It's hyper-kinetic, with a dizzying array of color, flash cuts and unsparing gore.However, after awhile it becomes numbing instead of intriguing. Apparently it's meant to be a social satire about media obsession with violence, and the public's glorification of violent misfits. But satire requires subtlety, timing and irony. NBK beats you over the head, pounding the viewer nearly senseless until there's no genuine irony or satire at all. It leaves you with the impression that it's not satirical at all - people are indeed mindless automatons with no moral compass. I felt like shouting "I get it, alright?" The entire movie is like a root canal with a shot of Novocaine to the brain. I couldn't wait for it to end.