Natural Born Killers (1994)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Two victims of traumatized childhoods become lovers and serial murderers irresponsibly glorified by the mass media.
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6 films that influenced Natural Born Killers
What critics say influenced Natural Born Killers
Unlike in Oliver Stone's infinitely more strident and simplistic Natural Born Killers (1994), society (and cinema) only provides a framework for the characters to exist within, not a means to justify their murderous actions (Badlands never really motivates or justifies its characters' actions, but neither does it condemn them).
In Oliver Stone's version (perversion?) of Tarantino's Badlands-homage screenplay Natural Born Killers, Woody Harrelson's characterization of the Kit-inspired road killer Mickey offers an opportunity for a new appreciation of Sheen's understated, mesmerizing performance.
Here, Stone spins a variation on the scorpion and the frog story famously re-told by Welles in Confidential Report.
As a kind of mash-up of Wild at Heart, Network, and The Honeymoon Killers, Natural Born Killers is unavoidably lurid and a bit much to take.
Behind bars, Mickey is brutalized by a sadistic warden (played with cartoon relish by Tommy Lee Jones), who appears to have sprung, full blown, out of one of Stone's "Midnight Express" flashbacks.
Stone gives it all he's got, with stuttered editing, floating dutch angles, front projections of director's commentary ("too much t.v." on the lovers) and rear projections of media (from Leave it to Beaver to self-indicting clips showing the Stone-penned violence of Midnight Express and Scarface).
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It is also almost certainly the most self-conscious entry in that cycle of films that comprises Gun Crazy, Badlands , and True Romance (and its bastard cousin, Natural Born Killers).
As a kind of mash-up of Wild at Heart, Network, and The Honeymoon Killers, Natural Born Killers is unavoidably lurid and a bit much to take.
I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was reminded of it during some of the long, drawn-out portions of JFK.
Admittedly, he has taken very personal points of view toward controversial subjects in several of his pictures like "Platoon," "Salvador," "Wall Street," "Talk Radio," and "Born on the Fourth of July"; and he has been stylistically over-the-top in at least one picture, "Natural Born Killers."
The style of “JFK” colored many of the films that followed (including the better ones like “Natural Born Killers” and the real stinkers like “Nixon”).
Oliver Stone has directed a number of fine films, many of which you could call “prestige pictures,” that have included “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “JFK,” “Nixon,” and “Wall Street.
To these ends, Stone employs the techniques—shifting film stocks, color filters, unnatural camera angles, non-diegetic inserts, and so on—he used to such success in JFK and, later, Nixon .
Reteaming with Oscar-winning JFK cinematographer Robert Richardson, Stone shoots Killers in 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, and video, cutting amongst them like a Super Bowl director.