First off I want to point out that Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone's famous Natural Born Killers had to be edited 5 times to earn its R rating. The version I saw is the director's cut, which would have been NC-17.
I've been told many times that NBK is a film that I needed to see. It has been in my Netflix queue for months. When I saw that it was expiring on January 1, I figured it was time to watch it.
NBK uses a multitude of graphic styles, from black and white, to super saturated, to 50's sitcom, to America's Most Wanted. It is extremely violent and graphic. It tries to be a comedy, a social commentary, an action film and an artistic expression. In the end it just ends up being a jumble.
I can see some merit to the film, such as the transformation of Detective Scagetti from an officer specializing in mass murderers, to a murderer himself. This directly relates to the quote by Neitzsche "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze
into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." However the social and philosophic commentaries are not enough to overcome the feel that this movie is violence for the sake of violence.
Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis deliver good performances, but every other character is ridiculously stereotyped and one dimensional. Even Robert Downey Jr, and Tommy Lee Jones's characters were so ridiculous that even their acting couldn't save them. Oliver Stone's
directing was unique and carried the film farther than it could have gone. The Mythbusters proved that you can actually polish a turd, but the fact remains...a polished turd is still a turd.
This movie is the epitome of a polished turd. I would advise against wasting your time watching it. It is definitely not something your kids should watch, and definitely deserves a NC-17 rating. I give it a 5/10.
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