After killing her parents and staging an impromptu roadside wedding, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis) take a honeymoon trip that consists of their murdering nearly fifty people. They quickly become media darlings, particularly for slimy tabloid television host Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.), who sees them as his ticket to the top of the ratings game.

Their fame only increases after their capture at the hands of Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), a fame-obsessed detective with a penchant for strangling hookers. They’re convicted and shipped to a Texas prison run by Warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones), who hatches a plan with Scagnetti to rid the world of Mickey and Mallory once and for all, thereby becoming rich and famous. But no prison can contain Mickey and Mallory--or their love--and while conducting a live interview with Gale, they stage a bloody escape.

CRITIQUE

Even were Natural Born Killers a good movie (guess I tipped my hand there, huh?), its arrival in theaters was rendered irrelevant by the media’s nonstop coverage of the O.J. nonsense.

Stone’s point (and I use that term loosely) was already evident to anyone who’d paid attention to the rise of tabloid television during the ‘80s--A Current Affair had been around for the better part of decade by the time this movie was released, while Geraldo had already found nothing in Al Capone’s vault and been busted in the nose while hosting a show centering on a few of my home state’s dumbest, vilest denizens--but the ubiquitous obsession with the minutia of the Simpson trial (which had nothing to do with whether or not justice was served, which is the only thing that should have mattered) took the wind out of this movie’s sails before it had even left the harbor.

After you’ve seen a real-life human being and his buddy being slowly chased down a California freeway by a bunch of cops cars and a few helicopters, what could a piece of fiction possibly have to add? Absolutely nothing, which is exactly what this movie has to offer. It says nothing new, says nothing new over and over again for more than two hours, and says nothing new in a boring, pretentious way. It may have been one of the most talked-about movies of its cinematic year, but I can sum up my opinion in three words: big damn deal.

This movie’s champions describe it as timely or prescient, but as I just mentioned, I beg to differ. I view Natural Born Killers as something of hybrid of A Clockwork Orange (which is alluded to here in one scene) and Being There, which predate it, respectively, by more than two decades and more than a decade (even more when you consider that both are based on books released a number of years before the films went into production).

But Killers doesn’t have the visceral and cerebral power (much less the artistic vision) of the first or the bravura acting of the second. All this movie has is one of cinema’s most heavy-handed filmmakers making the same point over and over again, and making it with all the subtlety of the Hiroshima blast.

Everything this movie has to say it says in its first scene; all it does after that is repeat this message ad nauseam. By the time the half-hour mark rolled around I was ready to scream into Stone’s ear and tell him I get it. I wouldn’t expect him to listen, but still. (Leonard Cohen’s “The Future,” which plays over the end credits, makes more or less the same statement as the movie, but it does it in less than seven minutes and encases it a much more appealing package. Take the hint, Oliver.)

I’ve read Quentin Tarantino’s original script, which was so heavily rewritten by Stone and two others that Tarantino ended up with only a story credit (it’s been reported that Tarantino, when he saw the finished product, asked to have his name removed entirely), and it has about as much of a point as Stone’s version, but it doesn’t try to pass itself off as some sort of clarion call. And while it shares the same pretensions as most of its author’s works, but Tarantino’s pretensions are a hell of a lot easier to swallow than Stone’s.

Tarantino’s story plays like a revved-up version of an old American International drive-in flick, while Stone’s plays like the most embarrassingly awful student film ever made. Tarantino was writing a Russ Meyer version of Bonnie and Clyde, while Stone ending up making a Stone version of Bonnie and Clyde; I’d much rather see the former.

This is yet another case of Stone making a movie for people who are going to agree with him and not give a damn that he’s repeating himself; he didn’t make it for people like me, and he didn’t make it for the people who are going to miss whatever point he’s attempting to make and simply sit there and gleefully chuckle or whoop it up whenever a victim’s head explodes. That’s the sort of intentionally narrow filmmaking I’ll never be able to understand, and I happen to think Kubrick was a god.

The movie would probably play much better if half of the dialogue had been cut. What’s being shown is bad enough, but the awfulness is compounded by the spell-it-all-out dialogue. Take the “wedding” scene, during which Mickey and Mallory toss their possessions off a bridge. I can’t imagine anyone not getting the meaning of this scene, but Stone makes sure no one will miss it by having Mickey explain what’s happening. Give me a break.

Hell, there’s a similar scene in Empire of the Sun and not even Spielberg--a man not exactly known for being subtle--stopped to have someone explain it. And it would definitely play better if it were thirty minutes shorter. Once the movie hits the half-hour mark, it starts to crawl, stacking up scenes that are either overlong or completely unnecessary. Why is that scene with the Russell Means character even in the movie? Couldn’t someone come up with a simpler way to set up the drugstore sequence? And didn’t Stone realize the scene was laughable when he used it in The Doors three years earlier? And why is the sequence in the prisoner longer than the wedding that opens The Deer Hunter? I doubt actually being locked up would be so tedious.

I also think Stone chose the wrong tone for the material. The movie is relentlessly cartoonish, making it impossible to take seriously. Manic satire or not, the fact that absolutely nothing here is grounded in reality renders both the story and its message completely ineffectual. Look at Dr. Strangelove and Sunset Blvd. The title character of the first is a former Nazi scientist who’s constantly trying to strangle himself with his own hand, while the latter is about a crazy old broad who lives in a sprawling mansion with a dead chimp (and is narrated by a corpse).

But those movies are really only outlandish around the edges; they’re built around a believable core, which serves to make the more cartoonish elements easier to swallow. (Of course, it also helps that both movies hit the bull’s-eye every time they take aim.) This movie is just so damned off-the-rails--both stylistically and content-wise--that it ends up being distancing.   

On a purely technical level, the movie does have its merits. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is, as always, excellent. Sure, Stone throws in more Dutch angles than all 120 episodes of the ‘60s Batman television series combined, and the use of different stocks (35mm, 16mm, 8mm, videotape) does nothing but call attention to itself, but as far as the photography itself goes, there’s nothing to complain about. Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan’s editing is fantastic; again, Stone rubs the audience’s nose in his technique (which borrows heavily from Kurosawa and Peckinpah), but it’s all put together seamlessly.

The cut presented here is the same director’s cut released on laserdisc back in the ‘90s and on DVD about nine years ago. It runs roughly three minutes longer than the theatrical cut, representing what Stone originally presented to the MPAA back in ’94. The “new” material here is what he was forced to cut in order to avoid an NC-17 rating; there are no wholly new scenes, just bits of violence that had to be snipped.

To put it simply, people are shot more times, people are stabbed more times, people are bludgeoned more times, and Mickey’s violent rape of the woman in the motel room is shown rather than implied. The reels of actual deleted material have not been reintegrated here, although much of the material has been included in the form of supplemental material.

THE VIDEO

By the time I received this disc, word regarding the 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer’s strange anomaly had already hit. Seeing as how so many people who enjoy bitching on the ‘net are always making mountains out of molehills, I took all of this talk with a grain of salt. This time, however, everyone was right.

From the moment the Warner Bros. logo hits the screen, there’s a visible wobble in the image. Imagine you’re in a theater and the projectionist continually bumps the projector, or perhaps there’s a low-magnitude earthquake. The entire frame rocks back and forth ever so slightly; this becomes less noticeable as the movie moves along and the frenetic editing and camera movements take over, but lock in on a stationary object in a shot and you can still notice it. The source of this remains a mystery, although it seems to have occurred at the telecine level, as it also affects the concurrent Blu-ray release.

Other than this, though, the movie looks damned great, a far cry from the first DVD release of this cut. The visuals are inherently soft, the black and white footage is intentionally grainy, and the videotaped scenes are naturally washed-out and dull, but the 35mm sequences are smooth, detailed, and film-like. The movie is awash with bold, oversaturated colors, and they look very good; blacks are also strong. Too bad about that wobble.  

THE AUDIO

Nothing to complain about with the Dolby Digital 5.1 track included here. It’s not the most active mix in terms of surround action, but it sounds very, very good for a mix from the early days of digital sound. Dialogue is always clear and intelligible, there’s some healthy low end activity, the eclectic soundtrack sounds great, and the discrete effects that do pop up are seamlessly integrated. A Spanish Dolby 2.0 Surround dub is also included; English, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Kicking off the extras is a commentary by Oliver Stone. If you’ve ever heard a Stone commentary before, you already know what to expect. He rambles on about the movie’s meaning, spells everything out, complains about the people who still don’t get it, and points out what was trimmed for the theatrical version. (I make no bones about my opinion of Stone, who in my mind is one of the most overrated directors in cinema history, so you may want to factor that in.)

Stone also supplies a new video introduction (4 minutes) for the movie, during which he pompously recites a poem.

NBK Evolution: How Would It All Go Down Now? (22 minutes) is a quasi-retrospective featurette, covering the movie’s reception and the world of tabloid television. For my money, this is the best part of this release; by featuring input from such cultural luminaries as Steve Dunleavy, Tila Tequila, and Joey Buttafuoco, it manages to savage the modern media far better than the movie itself does.   

Chaos Rising (26 minutes) is a vintage making-of featurette. Highlights: Downey looks like he’s near death; Sizemore can’t stop blinking; producer Jane Hamsher cheerfully relates a story in which she, Stone, and other members of the production violated DUI laws while scouting locations; Stone mentions how great Tarantino’s script was.

Up next is a collection of six deleted scenes (20 minutes). Here is where you’ll find the excised bits with Dennis Leary, Ashley Judd, and Rachel Ticotin. Stone provides optional commentary for these scenes.

You also get an alternate ending (5 minutes), which is introduced by Stone. This rather incomprehensible capper features a return of the mysterious character played by Arliss Howard (whose work in this scene is awful).

The Charlie Rose interview with Oliver Stone (11 minutes) is a segment from a ’94 episode of Rose’s talk show. It’s fun to watch Stone--whose first two directorial efforts were violent horror movies and who also wrote Scarface--ignore a critic’s negative take on the movie (her reaction was similar to mine) and launch into a tirade about the desensitization of the American populace by popular entertainment.

This release also comes with a 44-page booklet that contains cast/crew bios, photos, production notes, and press materials.

Closing out the extras is the movie’s theatrical trailer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Watching this movie made me realize just how much I miss having Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder around to do this sort of thing right. As much as I hate the movie, though, I wish the transfer hadn’t been botched, as this seems to be just the release fans have been looking forward to. But as it stands, I’d advise even them to rent first; maybe we’ll soon get some word from Warner about what went wrong and if/when it’s to be corrected.