Review: Natural Born Killers (1994)

 Natural Born Killers (1994)

Rated R for extreme violence and graphic carnage, for shocking images, and for strong language and sexuality (unrated director's cut reviewed)

Score: 4 out of 5

If there were ever a movie where the words "it's not for everyone" needed to be put at the front of every review like a warning label, it would be Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone's exploration of an "if it bleeds, it leads" tabloid media taken to its logical conclusion. Made years before true crime fandom made people like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and the Columbine killers out to be misunderstood loners with hearts of gold, or even before the Columbine massacre itself happened, this is a film that predicted it all, never mentioning the internet but recognizing that, even in 1994, the rise of "trash TV" was elevating some of the worst people in the world into celebrities. It was controversial enough in its day, and it has only gotten moreso in a world where the list of copycats inspired by the film (including the Columbine killers) is so long that it has its own page on Wikipedia. It's a movie where the only two people who are presented as even remotely likable are the two titular mass murderers, a young couple in love causing chaos across the decadent and depraved world that produced them. Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the first draft of the script and was credited with coming up with the story, despised what Stone did with it. It is trippy as balls, a film I've seen called "the world's most expensive student film" for its out-there visual style, all the better to reflect the out-of-its-mind, media-addled world in which the film takes place, a snapshot of everything awful about the '90s tossed right in your face.

Even today, this movie still has the capacity to both shock and amuse, like Network for the '90s with a much, much darker and meaner sense of humor. It's the kind of film that many movies that try to be shocking and satirical aspire to be, and if you're not on its wavelength, it can be a very hard movie to vibe with. It's also a movie whose violence and nihilism can ironically make it feel like it's pulling its punches, especially with its two plots seeming to conflict at times, the legacy of Tarantino's dark love story peeking through Stone's satire. It's why I cannot, in good conscience, call this a great movie. Make no mistake, though, this is a movie that deserves to be seen. It is an absolute trip, the product of Tarantino's grindhouse sensibilities filtered through Stone's politics and sense of style that still lands many of the punches it takes, and one you're not likely to soon forget.

Our "protagonists" Mickey and Mallory Knox are a young couple who both came from broken homes (Mallory's shown on screen, Mickey's implied) and are on a road trip across the American West killing people, simply for the thrill of it. Between the shocking nature of their crimes and the fact that they look like a young Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, they have become folk heroes to a generation, the obsession of unscrupulous tabloids and talk show hosts who have made them international celebrities. A shootout at a pharmacy is covered live by a Japanese reporter, and a gas station employee recognizes them from the TV and winds up getting killed. The man most responsible for their stardom, Wayne Gale, is the Australian-born creator of the hit documentary series American Maniacs, and as their crime spree escalates he winds up joining the police in hot pursuit, hoping to score an interview with Mickey to air live after the Super Bowl.

While the film is named for Mickey and Mallory, a good argument could be made that Wayne Gale was the character who the film was most interested in. Even though he's not responsible for the deaths of 52 people in a bloody crime spree, he's arguably the biggest sack of shit in the whole movie, the man enabling the killers by crafting a romantic image of them as two deadly yet cool lovebirds on the run. He is this film's real heart and soul, an inky, pitch-black monstrosity evocative of Geraldo Rivera (kids, ask your parents) whose sins are all too relevant in the modern age of true crime podcasts and fandom. He may be played by Robert Downey, Jr., but the only things he has in common with Tony Stark are that he's a celebrity and a jerk. Downey is shockingly slimy in the part, a loathsome, self-congratulatory jackass who doesn't care how many people he has to step on to get his story and become rich and famous, a portrait of everything rotten about "trash TV", the tabloids, and modern journalism in general. The whole movie, I couldn't wait for this motherfucker to get what he had coming to him.

And then we get to Mickey and Mallory themselves, two characters that are almost perfect but whose presentation within the film ultimately holds it back from greatness. Harrelson and Lewis are amazing, make no mistake. They are perfectly cast as a pair of sexy, white-trash killers, and none of the faults with their characters are on them. In fact, in another movie that didn't have this one's satirical thrust, their characters would've been two of the greatest villain-protagonists in cinema history, and a case could be made that they still are. The problem is that Stone's main interest here was clearly in satirizing the media, and yet he all too frequently seems to buy into the romanticization of Mickey and Mallory that's supposed to paint Wayne as a bad guy and the public at large as idiots. I've often heard it said by Tarantino fans that they'd love to see him or somebody else film his original script, but in my opinion, the best of both worlds would've been a film that paired Stone's media satire with Tarantino's characterization of the two as unrepentant, irredeemable murderers with only the most surface-level charm. Have Mickey and Mallory as absolute monsters. Portray their relationship as a mutually abusive one, which the scene in the hotel room seems to hint at but which is never followed up on. Have more scenes of them on their crime spree, as opposed to situations where them fighting back could be interpreted as justified. Show the scene where they got the suitcase full of a little girl's belongings, as opposed to them just going through it on the bridge after the fact. Keep some of the deleted scenes of the survivors of their rampages giving their testimony. And, through it all, have Wayne Gale continue to ignore all of this so he can craft a TV-friendly legend of these two romantic outlaws roaming the countryside, only caring about the people they hurt so he can exploit them for ratings. It would've been an even sicker and more twisted movie than the one we got, but it would've cut that much deeper.

Instead, the film is ultimately just too sympathetic to Mickey and Mallory. The sitcom sequence was hysterical, a dark satire of shows like Married... with Children that make light of dysfunctional families by juxtaposing the real horrors of a broken home with a laugh track and three-camera framing, one that also makes for a nice villain origin story for Mallory. But in the context of the film as a whole, it's another scene where the two of them kill people (Mallory's parents) who completely deserve it. The opening scene in the desert diner has a horny jackass redneck provoke Mallory's wrath. At the gas station, Mallory killing the attendant who recognized her is a perfectly logical reaction if you're wanted for murder. Tom Sizemore's sleazy cop Jack Scagnetti and Tommy Lee Jones' craven prison warden Dwight McClusky, the representatives of the law in this movie, are both crooks. Mickey and Mallory drive past a random murder in the middle of the street in a small town. The film wants us to root for Mickey and Mallory to burn down the rotting society they live in, but it then condemns Wayne for making them look like a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde burning down a rotting society. To put it as bluntly as possible, Oliver Stone, when making this movie, may have had more in common with Wayne Gale than he'd care to admit.

That being said, while Wayne may well be Stone's id peeking through, he is presented as an exceptional showman, and if nothing else, this movie is stylish as hell. In the opening scene alone, we get music video editing, the camera switching between black-and-white and color, and bullet time five years before The Matrix -- specifically, the kind of parody of bullet time that Chuck Jones and Tex Avery might've made for a Looney Tunes cartoon if you'd sent a copy of The Matrix back in time to 1939. Old-fashioned camera tricks and special effects are regularly employed to highlight the artificiality of the world and how unreal everything around Mickey and Mallory is, to the point that a magic mushroom scene at an Indian man's ranch was just par for the course. Stone went for broke with the movie's sense of style, employing every hyperkinetic visual trick he could think of, and it fed straight into the film's twisted "modern Western outlaw" vibe, especially when paired with a soundtrack produced by Trent Reznor that was rich with both classic folk and country and modern '80s/'90s alternative rock. There was never a dull moment watching this, a film that's constantly finding new depths to plumb in both the depravity of its world and its mind-bending visuals. Stone wanted to create a world in which people like Mickey and Mallory were the logical conclusion of every nasty, rotten trend of the early '90s, and while he may have whiffed on the writing, he hit it out of the park on the direction.

The Bottom Line

"NBK" is a movie I liked less as I thought about it more, one that nailed some but not all of its satirical thrust even if a lot of it is still relevant today. As a movie, however, it is an experience, a trip back to the '90s at their trashiest and most nihilistic courtesy of a filmmaker who knows how to make such an experience. If you decide to check this out, buckle up for one hell of a ride.