Natural Born Killers

Like all good satirists, he knows that too much realism will weaken his effect. He lets you know he's making a comedy. There's an over-the-top exuberance to the intricate crosscut editing and to the hyperactive camera. more

Stone takes his characters right over the top, rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough-where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis. more

Natural Born Killers is visually complex and thematically simple. Mixing film and video, black-and-white and color, morphing and animation, Stone breaks visual ground here for a major studio release.

Love it or hate it for its content, one must concede that it is nothing short of a technical marvel. more

Natural Born Killers never digs deep enough. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth. more

Berserk from the outset, Natural Born Killers lunges for our collective viscera in its opening sequence (surely one of the most brilliant establishing sequences of all time) and never lets go for the next two hours. more

Wildly unconventional, corrosively satirical, savagely violent and vulgar, Natural Born Killers is more self-consciously radical (in form, if not necessarily in content) than any other major studio release in recent memory. more

One doesn't leave this movie profoundly shocked about our collectively inured state, or the fact that Stone got us to laugh at caricatured violence. One merely leaves puzzled and wondering: Is that it? He's not telling us anything. He's riffing on a theme and--intentionally or not--contributing to the junk pile he supposedly decries. more

Our culture may be drifting toward the sort of calamity that Stone describes in Natural Born Killers, but the hysteria he depicts seems to come from within him. His soul is in turmoil and so he keeps trying to convince us that we're sick. more

Stone calls this bile satire. But satire takes careful aim; Killers is crushingly scattershot. By putting virtuoso technique at the service of lazy thinking, Stone turns his film into the demon he wants to mock: cruelty as entertainment. more

There's no denying that this is one of the most over the top movies ever made. It's essentially the minds of Mickey and Mallory put onscreen, which is psychotic and all over the place. It's almost hard to watch at times, granted, that's the idea. Even though it's fairly obvious, I really like what this has to say about human nature, not just the media. There's something very true about people loving violence and death. Oliver Stone does everything for a reason and this certainly has a big message. more

Pretty fun badassery, but the message is too cloudy. I like Mickey's philosophy that murder is pure, but I don't think the filmmakers believed it. Mickey and Mallory have one ethical quandary (regretting killing the Native American man), which seems to hint at an ethical code - only kill those who do us wrong - but they end up breaking the code...so now what? more

An explosive and unforgettable film. An exhilerating adreniline-rush. A powerful, riveting, scary and shockingly brilliant. A great taste of pulp entertainment. Director, Oliver Stone's genre-bending masterpiece. A wickedly hilarious, terror-filled, action-packed anarchy picture of a world gone mad. It takes you deep in the minds of madness. Woodey Harrelson gives a pure powerhouse performance. Tommy Lee Jones is brilliant. Robert Downy. Jr is teriffic. A gut-tightning and mind-blowing pice of hard-rocking and exhilerating work more

Over the top, but so reliably so, that it loses its impact. It doesn't help that whatever moral commentary it tries to make, is lost in the confusion. One can easily see the Tarentino moments languishing under the surface treatment and post production. Despite all of this, it fufills its role as a post-adolescent mind-trip, something to watch in between Donnie Darko and Cecil B. Demented. Natural Born Killers amounts to an overly-violent "Fear and Loathing" for those with a short attention span. Still, the final scenes of the film, as well as the acting, is spot on, and bluntly entertaining. more

Less of a film and more of an adventure. Cheesy. Strange. Weird. Cool. You can use any of those words to describe the film, but in the end, all you really have is (more) questions. Great performances from everyone involved and one of the better soundtracks from the 90s. more

"Natural Born Killers" is not about glorifying violence; it's a chilling parody of the American fascination with violence. The quick changes from color to black and white and back again, interspersed with animated sequences, point up the satiric nature of the movie. Mickey and Mallory, very well played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, are two killing machines without heart or soul or conscience; their only redeeming virtues are their love for each other. They aren't meant to be sympathetic characters and they're not, but Oliver Stone's direction makes them pale in depravity besides... more