Natural Born Killers

Rating:
Summary: It simply is what it is
Review: I don't believe that there is another film that better epitomizes what a postmodern work of art is. Does that mean it is a great...even good...movie? I honestly don't know. NBK entertains me, amazes me, disgusts me, traumatizes me, makes me laugh, horrifies me, etc etc. I haven't the slightest idea what Oliver Stone intended this thing to say or do. I know that supposedly it was a protest against the media's penchant for sensationalization but I don't buy that. I think it's just an amazing, technically complex (and yet ultimately shallow) pastiche of largely stomach churning images. As a quintessential product of the late 20th Century, it is invaluable. It simply exists. If nothing else, it is an overloaded textbook of film styles/techniques. In the end, probably much ado about nothing. But it cannot be ignored. And that's more than I can say for most of the utterly worthless pablum that the 'artistes' of late 20th-early 21st century America have foisted onto our culture.

Rating:
Summary: THE WORST (I MEAN WORST) MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN
Review: If you want to see a movie that shows some insight into human emotions and questions motives of different types of individuals, particularly those involved one way or another with illegal activities, I recommend "The Concrete Jungle." Oliver Stone missed the mark on this one and just satisfied his unhealthy fascination with violence. Sick movie, for people with sick minds!

Rating:
Summary: it's art, for crying out loud
Review: You have to be a fool to call this movie "inept" or something like that. This is a creation of a skilled director, and it is obviously exactly the way he wanted.

With that said, it's not for everyone. The negative reviews on here shows that this kind of art only connects to a certain audience. I personally enjoyed the heck out of it and thought it was perfect.
(I think you gotta be little sick and twisted to feel this way though.)

Rating:
Summary: The idea behind and the movie are brilliant
Review: Yes, of course this movie is a furious parody about media, media-influences and driving-forces. That's especially obivious in the end, when the media literally gets killed in person of the reporter.
One should keep in mind that Mickey and Mallory are not killing machines without any conscience just by that. First, their incredible harsh childhood lead to their killing obsession (they are victims in this matter). Second - and that's one of the most important scenes and themes in the movie - they change their minds when Mickey killed the indian. It's a turning point. (that's why the court scene has been cut out, showing too much brutality AFTER the indian-experience).
The jail-interview is in my opinion a very sophisticated, interesting and provoking one; but of course that's just a personal opinion.
I didn't like the movie at first sight. But it has the ability to grow and show lots of aspects at second sight.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing...
Review: Oliver Stone's visceral vision is fully realized in this unrated version of the most controversial film of the 1990s. Not before and not since has a movie exploited the media with such spark, such drive, and such violence. We see first hand the violent rampage of Micky and Mallory Knox told as only Oliver Stone could tell it. And only Stone could be worthy enough to do a movie like this. I think even Tarentino would have his flaws here. Stone is best when he's controversial. This is his second best film, however. His best is the little-known flick "Talk Radio."

Rating:
Summary: Black page in Stone's filmography
Review: Stone must be still laughing about all the fuss this "movie" generated. Why? Because this is lame. He swindled us all. Disguising all the badness of this movie as "director's use of new angles, new filters, or whatever", he made of the worst films ever, with bad and over the top acting by everyone involved, with disgusting characters.

And all that for what? To make a point that midia and people love violence? Come on, he did not achieved that. The movie is just a gore feast, a disguised B-movie, and I'll tell you what: he lost a fan here, because I've never watched another movie by him again after this turkey.

I say: This movie is pointless, absurd, generic, ultra-violent. One simply can not have the arrogance to say that he used violence of this level in a movie, to say that he is against violence!! Stone used it because he liked it, because all he wanted to do was shock the audience. Simply as that.

Rating:
Summary: This is not fun
Review: A movie like this is not fun. THis is the movie where Stone apparently lost his mind, and succumbed to the popularity of Tarantino at the time (in its appice), so he accepted to shoot this sick piece of garbage.

Shame on Woody Harrelson for accepting to be in it. As for Julliette Lewis, she practically made sure that she will never be able to act in another role than that of crazy and disturbed women.

If Stone wanted to criticize the press and the people's thirsty for violence and instant "heroes", I imagine that he could have got his hands in another screenplay, other than this atrocity.

I',ve already watched a number of ultra-violent movies. But NATURAL BORN KILLERS is above them all, with something else: it's stupid. It's ugly. It's bad. And it absolutely does not have the moral lesson he was supposed to give.

Rating:
Summary: Okay but not great
Review: I realize that this movie isn't all about violence, and in fact, is more of a parody of our culture's obsession with it. But by trying to be a profound movie about violence it goes over the heads of most viewers, who of course simply see it as another movie glorifying violence just like all the other violent movies out there. So in fact the movie fails in its chief goal, although the movie as just a movie isn't that bad, and might even be pretty good.

That having been said, I will give a nod to Woody Harrelson for his fine performance. There was speculation that Harrelson, being pretty much exclusively a TV actor up to this point, wouldn't have the kind of on-screen presence a big-screen movie requires. I'm not sure I even know what the pundits were referring to here, but I would say their concerns turned out to be unfounded, as I thought Harrelson actually did a very fine job in his part. And as for Lewis, well, she's easy to look at, and she gets a couple of terrific straight lefts to that guy's face which were pretty entertaining, when she was beating up the dude in the diner, but overall, I wouldn't put her in Harrelson's class as an actress.

All in all, not a bad movie, but I still have a problem with the message about violence, and which unfortunately turned out to be a non-message because of what people are really going to think. As I said, it's not a bad film, and as "just another movie" it might be pretty good, but I'm told by my movie pundit acquaintances that one is supposed to expect more from film genius Oliver Stone. I will defer to their superior erudition in that case and so only give it 3 or 3.5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: John Tanner & Vivie Warren
Review: I ultimately object to NBK's theme, but it's a good movie in a general sense: well done and fun to watch.

Mickey and Mallory, although they're murderers, have more life in them than anyone else in the movie. They are given superhuman strength and vitality (or, perhaps, merely human, contrasted with a subhuman society) as characterization---it's their will, their love and defiance that are strong; these manifest themselves physically in an age that worships violence. Compare Mickey with George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan: "[He] follows his own instincts, without regard to the common, statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliances with which [he] associates them), finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by force as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops against vermin."

And the institutions here are like vermin. Tommy Lee Jones' cop is genuinely sadistic, Robert Downey Jr.'s reporter is genuinely amoral, and "Officer Scagnetti" is genuinely depraved, sick, and psychotic. The authorities are old, tired, practically impotent: they don't dare attack M & M till they've stun-gunned and maced them. To the extent that NBK exposes the moral hypocrisy of modern society, I dig it. This movie tears the mask off of our appetite for murder news and it assigns sadistic law enforcers to a lower rung in hell than criminals. The fact that we needed such a wake-up call is more frightening than the film's violence.

Of this violence much has been said; to me, it was cartoony and not usually disturbing. Only one of the movie's three really horrifying moments is violent: when Jones, jumping at the opportunity for cruelty, clamps a convict's nose with pliers. The other two scenes I mean are these: When Downey Jr. decides he's a natural born killer, dumps his wife and calls his mistress; and when Scagnetti, alone in the cell with Mallory, gets so delirious with erotic excitement that it's sickening to watch.

M & M are the only moral people in the film---except the Indian. The Indian alone avoids being a sheep or parasite without becoming a murderer. But he has no motive except detached resignation to fate. Mickey repeatedly invokes fate, too; but he's fate's agent, not its patient. This brings me to my objection to Oliver Stone's movie.

The killers are born killers; the weak are (presumably) born weak. The cop & the anchorman who try to become killers cannot do so, even when they kill: they remain weak; they can't change their fate. Yet they are the ones in authority, with law and "morality" on their side. It seems Oliver Stone is spinning the old yarn about laws and moral codes being merely devices whereby the weak chain the strong. (Note the scene where the prison is opened.) Stone joins his villians in secretly worshipping Mickey and Mallory: it's a tradition as old as sophistry. Our age doesn't need Stone---it needs Socrates.

Rating:
Summary: WHAAAT?
Review: Ok, so I was reading the on line reviews of this movie..
"Great film?", "Best film?"... WHAAT?
In my opinion nothing more than a pretencious attempt to make bad trashy pop culture.
Oliver Stone was more interested on impressing the teens that were not supposed to see the film (but do, as they always do) than in telling a coherent history.
This flick is eyecandy for violence starved minds, but that is not what bothers me (my mind has craved for its share of visual violence more than one time). What bothers me is that unlike Dobermann or Mad Max or any other nice little violence flick, Natural Born Killers tries to redeem itself as a socially concious movie.
...I would have given it only a star, but as I said, there are very nice looking scenes in the film...
The Dinner scene... A cool looking killer and a blond chick making a bloddy mess... That was nice.