Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Two victims of traumatized childhoods become lovers and serial murderers irresponsibly glorified by the mass media.
Natural Born Killers is one of the most visually audacious American films of the 1990s — Stone and DP Robert Richardson deploy a relentless, kaleidoscopic barrage of film stocks, aspect ratios, animation, and color grading that remains genuinely distinctive. The satirical conception is equally bold, skewering media glorification of violence with gleeful excess. The acting is committed if deliberately cartoonish — Harrelson and Lewis are electric in the leads, though the performances are intentionally stylized rather than nuanced. The plot is thin by design, functioning more as a delivery mechanism for the film's polemic than a traditional narrative, which limits its score. The ending deflates somewhat, retreating into a more conventional violent-escape conclusion that fails to match the anarchic invention of the film's midsection.