Review of Natural Born Killers (1994) by Phil C — 20 Feb 2011

I've listed Robert Downey Jr as one of my favourite actors, so it's about time I reviewed a film he appears in! It's very much in a supporting role to Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis's Mickey & Mallory (say this with a broad American hick accent for maximum effect!), a modern-day psycho Bonnie & Clyde with a better sense of what will get them maximum media attention.

As the film unfolds, you're waiting for the moment when one or both of them will shoot him - I thought it would be during the jailbreak when Tommy Lee Jones gets cornered by the rioters - it's actually afterwards when he's blathered to them about how he's "never felt so alive" and then pleaded grovellingly for his worthless, journalistic life.

My opinion of the film changed greatly between the first and second times I saw it, at first I found myself among the "moral majority", saying things like "these people are worthless scum, and so is Oliver Stone for making it! And after he did "JFK",too!" Despite it's excesses, If you view it as a tongue-in-cheek road movie it's like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you,which was Stone's intention all along: It has a wicked sense of what has the most visual impact which sometimes lends it an hallucinatory,trippy quality, as if reality and dreams have been put through a blender.

Harrelson and Lewis are perfectly cast as the homicidally star-crossed lovers, who get married on the road between one killing spree and the next - sometimes someone will provoke their anger, but mostly the violence ensues because they're, all together now, "natural born killers!".