Natural Born Killers (1994)
Oliver Stone realized a unique achievement with Natural Born Killers. He has crafted a film which is a scathing indictment of itself. To be fair, it likewise indicts all other media that glorify violence. It has the audacity to say, "Violence is bad! What are you doing sitting there enjoying this movie?"
Well, chances are you won't be enjoying it.
It's a complete mess that assaults the senses and inspires revulsion. The story is simple enough. A pair of emotionally abused misfits join together on a crime spree and become celebrities. The story of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate has been told several times before, in four movies, a novelization, and a Bruce Springsteen song. Updated here for the 90's, the theme isn't doomed lovers, or cold bloodedness, but the media's willingness to celebrate violence and the public's bottomless appetite for it.
Stone's goal seems to be to entertain the viewer, and at the same time make the viewer feel bad about being entertained. It's the cinematic equivalent of going to a pig roast hosted by PETA. Action movie violence is interspersed with quick cuts of autopsy photos and other real life gory images. Trying to keep the viewer off-guard, there are mixed filmmaking techniques, black and white, color, video, animation, and so on, with a constant disphony of ugly background noise. The movie seems to be constantly commenting on itself, as if layering itself in enough irony would insulate it against criticism.
The best part of the movie is Rodney Dangerfield, who stands out as a daughter-raping scumbag; sort of the logical extension of his characters from Easy Money and Caddyshack. His killing seems quite justified, and in fact you would be a creep if you didn't want to see him dead. He's also the first victim of the killers, setting up the viewers to cheer on their murderous rampage. This early scene, done as if it were a sitcom, complete with mawkish music and canned laughter, is the most clever.
Soon thereafter the movie spirals off into a kind of visual psychotic tirade. An ambiguous message is one thing, an unpleasantly hallucinatory and self-contradictory screed is quite another. The only real question is when will the viewer tire of the experience. If you're like me, it will be long before the rioting prisoners stuff the struggling guards into the pizza ovens. Long before.
