Natural Born Killers: On-This-Day Thursday
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Every Thursday, an older film released on this opening weekend years ago will be reviewed. They can be classics, or simply popular films that happened to be released to the world on the same date.
For August 24th, we are going to have a look at Natural Born Killers.
One of a handful of films I’m genuinely conflicted about, Natural Born Killers just irks me. Despite its important commentary on the glorification of terrible people — which the film itself partakes in, and not in a satirically satisfying tone — the project just feels like it misses its mark a little bit. For me, it’s the try-hard nature that yanks the entire story along. I get that this is an edgy picture about a controversial subject matter, but Natural Born Killers feels like the crux of the most “woke” and “taboo” works of the feisty nineties (a time period where many filmmakers were trying to rebel). A few works like this, including Fallen Down and The Boondock Saints, just reek of synthetic intensity. There’s a difference between projected volume and screaming; the former is commanding, and the latter is just annoying.
I find that Oliver Stone can be quite a filmmaker. If we look at Platoon, we can see his signature angst at its very best: a slow buildup of tension, power struggles, and anguish that boils over in a myriad of affecting ways. Something like Natural Born Killers is Stone at his most excessive, and this isn’t the first time we have seen this kind of behaviour. Enter his remake of Scarface, which he wrote the screenplay for (and Brian De Palma directed). The film feels like an overload of violent gangster film tropes and phrases parrotted and mimicked back at us. Natural Born Killers is no different. Quentin Tarantino — a fresh filmmaker at the time — knew how to tiptoe on the line of too-much and just right. He could occasionally slip (enter the monologue in The Hateful 8), but this was a rare occasion. His story for True Romance got a little carried away, but director Tony Scott figured out ways (albeit conventional ones) to keep it on track. Stone runs with the premise of Natural Born Killers and drives off the edge of a cliff without thinking twice. This is the kind of flawed anarchy I’m talking about. Tarantino himself has sworn off Natural Born Killers, and it’s easy to see why. Anyone watching Tarantino’s films, or the works of Martin Scorsese and like-minded directors for their obscenities and dangers are missing all of the beauty and cinematic prose in between. I’m not saying Stone isn’t capable of this kind of nuance (again, see Platoon), but it’s not here in Natural Born Killers.
Natural Born Killers is all killer and no filler, but its killer feels exactly like filler (if this makes sense).
Following these two serial killers (played admittedly well by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) is all well and good, but I can’t help but think of how it could be better. If we look at a Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde, any of their dangers and risks feel warranted, like they’ve successfully carved their paths of development, purpose, and thematic relevancies perfectly. Natural Born Killers is more interested in the end result: the media attention of these psychopaths. It’s a leap that does a major disservice to what could have been a very powerful film. It appeals more to the crowds that find these kinds of crazy behaviours exhilarating, but not those that want to know how we got there, or why there is any form of humanity in society’s worst people. There are glimpses of hope of a better film, like a curiously placed Rodney Dangerfield, that feel like the gambles that pay off and don’t resort to bottom-of-the-barrel tricks and conventions. I want to like Natural Born Killers more than I do, but that just isn’t happening. It’s hard to see past the tonal screaming of attention, when any person willing to see a film about murderers will already get and understand what this film is all about. I don’t feel quite as strongly as Tarantino does about his narrative child, but I’m certainly not of the demographic that loves this film either.
I’ll leave this review off with how I find the title contradictory.
Natural: this amount of cinematic warping to seem even more thrilling and dangerous is as artificial feeling as it can get.
Born: I guess this film was conceived and it exists, but certainly not as intended. It isn’t born as much as it was synthetically spawned.
Killers: Sure, there are killers in this, but this amount of excess cuts away any of that electrifying feeling and leaves a dull sensation that is anything but killer.
Put these words together and you get Natural Born Killers: a film that could have been powerful, but is just okay (and on the verge of being irritating).
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.