THE PLOT THUS FAR

Oliver Stone would like to have the last word on America's media culture of voyeurism and violence, but whatever he's trying to say in this grisly, unconventional movie comes across terribly garbled. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play traveling serial killers who become television celebrities when a Geraldo-like personality (Robert Downey Jr.) turns their madness into the biggest story in the country. Stone extensively rewrote an original script by Quentin Tarantino, and he employs a mosaic of different film stocks, video, and pop pastiches to create a sense of blurred lines between visual phenomena. (The background on Lewis's character's life as an abused child, for instance, is presented as a sitcom starring Rodney Dangerfield.) But the result of these experiments is a pompous, even amateurish effort at grasping the reins of a real-life national debate. One almost wants to tell Stone to sit down and raise his hand next time if he thinks he has something to say. The controversial director would like Natural Born Killers to be nothing less than a monumental achievement, but it's one of the emptier entries in his filmography.

WHAT WE THOUGHT

Natural Born Killers is the story of Mickey and Mallory Knox: a couple keen to unshackle themselves from their oppressive directionless existences by going on an anarchic killing spree across America. Their criminal career is soon the stuff of public fantasy and adoration: celebrity serial killers become pin-ups and poster children for a nihilistic nation desensitised to depravity and embracing violence with an almost religious zeal. Keen to cash in on this fundamentalist media circus, scummy journalists, pop-culture bottom feeders and sub-human leeches descend on Mickey and Mallory, eager to turn them into sex symbols for a generation hip to the sound of gunshots and claret. But Hollywood isn't ready for Mickey and Mallory, who have no desire to play the media game or attend press junkets. No, these two are, and will always be, natural born killers: and they're going to show America how far they're prepared to go to prove it.

Natural Born Killers was born of Stone's disillusionment with America's media wasteland of the Nineties, eager to capitalise on the violent delights of the real world by commodifying them as entertainment. Social commentary combines with a farcical take on the doomed romance of classical American cinema: Bonnie and Clyde-meets-A Clockwork Orange. Not content with simple storytelling, Stone wildly veers in to egomaniacal satire: the violent Hollywood film commenting on the violent Hollywood film. Can Natural Born Killers sustain all this self-reflexive demagoguery, or does Stone's vision only amount to indulgent gratuitousness and very little else?

The most striking thing about stone film is how it looks: a visual kaleidoscope of 'found' (read: stolen) footage owes as much to Kenneth Anger as it does to the contrived Hollywood hackwork Stone is renowned for. Hand-held cameras are gratuitously exploited to their most faux-verite potential, which displays a compositional ineptitude and complete lack of aesthetic sensitivity towards the characters and the audience by the cinematographer. Take not here of Stone's immediate emphasis on colourful surfaces and superficialities: they set a precedential tone for the two hours which follow.

The Blu-Ray comes with the extra four minutes that change the original cut into the more surreal Director's Cut. You get a commentary in a new introduction from Oliver Stone that was shot in HD. Plus, there's a new featurette shot in HD that explains how Natural Born Killers would've happened in today's modern media. The rest of the supplemental material are ports from the previous BR and DVD releases. Still, I'd recommend it for a purchase since this cut remains closer to Stone's true vision.

RELEASE DATE: 10/13/09