Directed by Oliver Stone. Screenplay by Tom Schulman. Cinematography by Robert Richardson.
Music by Trent Renzor.

Starring: Woody Harrelson, Juliettte Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones, Tom Sizemore, Russell Means, Rodney Dangerfield, Edie McClurg, Steven Wright, Joe Grifasi, James Gammon, Pruit Taylor Vince, Balthazar Getty, Dale Dye.

Rated: R -- violence and stupidity.

So, if Natural Born Killers has become "the most controversial movie of the year" or "the most talked about movie of the season" or "the most argued-about movie of the month," it's not because it makes any sort of bold political, sociological or aesthetic statement. People "love it or hate it" because it's a movie that puts them through a disagreeable experience, stirring up a lot of unpleasant feelings, for no good reason other than to get some sort of visceral, Pavlovian reaction from them. Far from being a "daring" movie on any level, Natural Born Killers is the most brain-dead and cowardly film I've seen in a very long time. It's not that it doesn't have the courage of its convictions; it just doesn't have any convictions. Instead, it's just a barf-bag of derivative MTV imagery spiked with a heavy dose of cheap irony.

Stone has called his movie a satire, but it's missing the one crucial ingredient of satire: a point of view. In the end, the only idea in the movie is Stone's assertion that tabloid TV reporters are a lower form of humanity than mass killers. That may be a provocative (if morally questionable) position to take, but it's just thrown out there; the movie doesn't even try to back it up. When killers Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) execute the Hard Copy-style sleazebag reporter (Robert Downey Jr., in the movie's best performance) at the end and then ride off into the sunset, you don't feel the movie's really trying to say anything. It's just leaving the door open for a sequel.

Stone has also said that Natural Born Killers is a condemnation of the way our crazy culture, and the media in particular, glorify and exploit violence (some ads use the laughably hypocritical line: "The Media Made them Superstars!"). Just one problem: This movie does exactly the same thing it pretends to be criticizing -- and gets off on it. Stone wants to have it both ways -- to condemn violence and its exploitation, and to acknowledge that it's fun to groove on that violence after all. In 1969, Stanley Kubrick tried to show the same sort of thing in A Clockwork Orange, just one of the movies NBK (as Stone and company have taken to calling it) wishes it were, along with Terence Malick's Badlands, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and David Lynch's Wild at Heart. But Kubrick's film, whatever its other faults, captured that ambivalence and communicated it to the audience; it got you to feel sorry for a pathetic monster but never urged you to applaud his cruelty.

I've talked to friends who have said they "liked" NBK, but none of them could tell me why, or tell me what they thought the movie was trying to accomplish. To them it was a big-screen video game (Doom in widescreen!) -- no more, no less. They said they just got off on the bombardment of sensations that the movie offers. (One of my own favorite recurring images is that of a headless, blood-drenched man in his underwear sitting on a bed in what looks like a motel room. I have no idea what it's doing in the movie, but it keeps popping up and, if it had been used in some context, it could really have been potent and creepy. After a while I decided it was a metaphor for the movie itself: a bloody apparition with nothing happening above the neck.) I think that's the test of people's response to NBK: If you just want to groove on the gory ride, you'll probably "like" it; if you bother to ask what the movie's up to, you realize it's just a stupid, cliché-filled mess.

The scene recalls David Rabe's horrifyingly funny play, Sticks and Bones, where Vietnam was given the Ozzie & Harriet treatment. Like Rabe, Stone (who, with collaborators, completely re-wrote Quentin Tarantino's original script) seems to be making a point about how television trivializes everything, how it masks real pain with saccharine plots and a laugh track. Put anything in the form of a sitcom and people will laugh -- or at least zone out and stare at it.

Then Mickey and Mallory kill Mallory's parents, stuffing dad's head into the fish tank and setting mom on fire in her bed. The movie's visceral message is: These people deserve to die -- dad because of what he did and mom because she didn't try to stop him. But is anything else going on here? Is the film pulling the old "blame-the-parents-for-the-sins-of-the-children" routine and saying this is the reason Mickey and Mallory turned out to be indiscriminate murderers? Does this excuse their behavior in any way? Well, I don't think NBK has any idea of what it's trying to suggest, other than to give you the kooky spectacle of patricide and matricide rendered in the style of MTV Sports. (Y'know, the kids, they love this stuff. It's hip, right?) Stone seems to be trying so hard to be "hip" and "cutting-edge" here, that it's embarrassing. He obtained the rights to Quentin Tarantino's early, original script (trying to borrow some "hip" credentials from a hot younger director, perhaps?) -- and then wiped out all the satirical and humorous material that gave the movie context, point of view, and a reason to exist. (Tarantino, who sold the rights to the script to a friend for a dollar -- only to have that friend re-sell it to Stone and company -- is furious with the way Stone has manhandled it and has publicly disowned the "Stoned" version. You can read some of the stuff Stone took out by clicking here.)

In interviews, Stone has been attempting to sell NBK as a comedy, but the jokes are so lame and the targets so easy that it's difficult to laugh much. A "black comedy" has to take a few risks, but this one pretty much stays at the "Aren't tabloid reporters idiots?" level. Well, duh.

The funniest and most revealing moment in the whole movie comes early on, when a young Mickey and Mallory "fan" is interviewed. He's like a frat boy at a football game (Stone wants us to see the parallels between this guy and the folks who cheered on O.J. Simpson during the slow-speed Bronco freeway "chase"), and his zeal is just as mindless. Then a serious wrinkle creases his brow as he tries to explain that, well, he doesn't actually approve of mass murder or anything, but "If I were a mass killer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory."