Review of True Romance (1993) by Movie G — 23 Aug 2011

True Romance may have been directed by Tony Scott and told in a somewhat linear fashion, but it still has Tarentino writtien all over it, and like most of his movies, its good, damn good. Tarentino only wrote the screenplay for this one and sold it to make enough money to fund his debut film Reservoir Dogs which came out a year earlier.

The dialogue is the same as everything else he's written, perfect. It's funny and sounds real. I've always liked Tarentino's scripts the best because they remind me of how me and my freunds talk.

We never talk about what we're doing just discuss random stuff. Tarentino is the only writer who understands this. It tells the story of Clarence who meets and falls in love with a girl named Alabama who just happens to be a call girl for an abusing pimp.

He goes, kills the pimp & takes what he believes are Alabama's belongings. It turns out to be just a suitcase full of half a million dollars worth of cocaine. The rest of the movie is spent with Clarence trying to sell it and the gangsters who owned it chasing him.

The directing by Tony Scott is good, but not as good as if Tarentino himself had directed it. It's typical for a crime-action movie and suits it well enough. The music is kind of weird, sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn't, not much else to say about it.

The highlight is not in the actors, but the characters they play. They're all original yet familiar. Clarence played by Christian Slater, which is probably his best performance, is just you're average guy.

He works at a comic book store, goes to movies in his spare time for fun, and doesn't really know what he's doing. Alabama, played by Patricia Arquette, is just a sad girl who you never really can understand whats up with her.

She's a mystery and that's what is so entriguing about her. The rest of the characters are fantastic, Christopher Walken as a gangster, James Gandolfini as his hitman, Dennis Hopper as Clarences dad (who gives the best diss in movie history, calling Walken a 'eggplant' to which Walken replies "You're a cantelope", Brad Pitt as a hilarious stoner who never leaves the couch, Michael Rapaport as a wannabe actor, and a drug crazed movie producer clearly influenced by Oliver Stone.

True Romance certainly isn't the best thing to ever come out of Quentin Tarentino's mind, but it's still worth checking out.