"Mickey: I realized my true calling in life.Wayne Gale: What's that?
Mickey: Shit, man, I'm a natural born killer."
Technically speaking, this film is extraordinary. Or maybe innovative. Breathtaking. Cutting-edge? There are definitely many adjectives this film's technical aspects. It takes a lower-tier, shallow script and turns it into a movie that is feverishly alive, for better or for worse. It follows the epic journey of Mickey and Mallory Knox, a couple who travel across the southwest for two weeks, killing everyone they can get their hands on. Forty-eight lay dead by the time they are brought in to custody and thrown in to jail, where the death penalty awaits them.
These two characters themselves are pretty damn shallow. The tagline says "The Media Made Them Superstars", but to me, this wasn't why they massacred these people, and this is the biggest, most fundamental problem that I had with NATURAL BORN KILLERS, a problem I couldn't really ever shake during its running time. "I kill because I'm a killer," says Mickey. That is the reasoning given by the Quentin Tarantino-penned script (thank God he made PULP FICTION that year) as to why they murder, in cold blood, dozens of strangers. While incarcerated, Mickey accepts an invitation to appear on a nationally televised show about the biggest criminals in America, hosted by Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), a man praying that this interview catapults him to fame. "It's just murder. All God's creatures do it. You look in the forests and you see species killing other species, our species killing all species including the forests, and we just call it industry, not murder" says Mickey, in front of millions.
Like I said though, this is a morbidly entertaining movie. While I didn't like some of it, I couldn't turn away, much less turn it off. As Mickey and Mallory, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis both have a lot of fun in shallowly written roles, and a pissed-off Tommy Lee Jones (playing the warden of the prison), a psychotic Tom Sizemore (as a slowly-unraveling cop who goes psycho because of his surroundings), and a WTF turn by Rodney Dangerfield as Mallory's molesting, controlling, ugly hick of a father are entertaining, in a sick way. Oliver Stone's direction has to be applauded as well. The man may be considered a conspiracy nut, but he has some balls. The film is extraordinarily violent and features no likeable characters, but he has made a hypnotic film that raises plenty of questions about violence and media, as well as being a visual feast on a small budget. Using different style cameras, black-and-white imaging, animation, bullet-view shots, and facial distortions, he is able to capture a lot of the surrealness and jaw-dropping lunacy of the situation that the script wasn't able to. If anything, NATURAL BORN KILLERS is alive.
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