Directed by: Oliver Stone

Premise: A satire of action films and media coverage of real life violence. Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) escape from violent childhoods and go on a cross-country killing spree. In the process, an unscrupulous television journalist (Robert Downey Jr.) turns them into celebrities.

What Works: Natural Born Killers is an insane trip through the American cultural landscape. What makes the film so successful, audacious, and nauseating is how it combines things that don’t appear to belong together in ways that create new meaning. For example, a flashback of Mallory’s abusive childhood plays like a sitcom, complete with canned laughter and end credits and includes Rodney Dangerfield as her molesting father. The combination is distressing because it plays on expectations and makes the audience reconsider how their culture is presented to them both in terms of docile domestic life and as violence mass marketed as entertainment. The portrayal of Mickey and Mallory is interesting beyond the obvious allure of exploring the psyche of a pair of killers. The film makes them into a litmus test of how the news media may take notorious individuals and turn them into household names, selling them and their acts into product. The story allows Mickey and Mallory a romantic, even overly sentimental, love story with conflicts and reconciliation. In its second half, as the two are sent to prison, the film allows for Mallory and especially Mickey to change and grow and achieve self-consciousness. In the end, they are the only two in the film capable of love, which exists in spite of the media’s exploitation of their crimes, and the couple’s manipulation of the media allows for their freedom. Natural Born Killers uses a variety of formats and editing techniques, manipulating sound and image to create insanity on par with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like Chainsaw, this film uses the cinematic form to be subversive, although Natural Born Killers is more concerned with pop culture. Aside from Lewis and Harrelson, there are some other great performances in Natural Born Killers including Robert Downey Jr. as journalist Wayne Gale (modeled after Geraldo Rivera), the true antagonist of the piece, Tommy Lee Jones as Warden Dwight McClusky, in which Jones eschews his usual stoicism for an over the top approach that suits the insanity of the picture, and Tom Sizemore as Detective Jack Scagnetti, a corrupt police detective with homicidal tendencies.

What Doesn’t: Some of the elements of Natural Born Killers critique of American culture are particular to the mid-1990s. A few of the cut-aways include the O.J. Simpson trial, the Menendez brothers murders, and the Waco disaster. Although the ideas are still relevant, the power of those images has diminished with age.

DVD extras: The director’s cut includes a commentary track, featurette, deleted scenes, alternate ending, trailer.

Bottom Line: Natural Born Killers is a superb example of using cinema for subversive ends. With the recent releases of Shoot ‘Em Up, Death Sentence, 300, War, Grindhouse, and other violent cinema as well as the ongoing obsession with celebrity gossip, Natural Born Killers’ critique of American entertainment and the culture’s obsession with celebrity remains relevant.