Based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, but heavily rewritten by David Veloz, producer Richard Rutowski and Stone himself, on the surface it is a familiar tale of lovers on the run.
We have seen it all before in films such as They Live by Night (1948) and True Romance (1993), another Tarantino original. But this time our heroes, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis), are unrepentant mass murderers, and the film’s over-the-top aesthetic matches their excesses.
After a challenging shoot for Heaven & Earth (1993), Stone intended to make a straightforward action film, “something Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud of”, he said on the DVD extras.
However, because of the breakdown of his second marriage, and his growing obsession with rolling news coverage of cases involving OJ Simpson, Rodney King, and the siege in Waco, Texas, it quickly morphed into “a vicious, cold-hearted farce”, he told Emanuel Levy.
The story is a simple one, following Mickey and Mallory as they drive along America’s Route 666 (now Route 491) killing people. After being sent to prison for crimes they very much did commit, they escape during an interview with sleazy TV journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jnr).
What is remarkable is the way the film is shot and edited to create a kind of sensory overload. There are almost 3,000 cuts, whereas most films have around 700, and no stylistic tic is left untried.
Stone, cinematographer Robert Richardson and editors Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan combine full-colour, filtered and black-and-white footage with subliminal inserts, animation, newsreel, adverts, vox pops, back projection – even a sequence at Mallory’s childhood home that plays like a sitcom.
It is exhausting, exclamation-mark cinema designed to overwhelm. On that basis, Natural Born Killers is extremely effective.
The soundtrack – compiled by Stone and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who would go on to win an Oscar for the score for The Social Network (2010) – is a clever mix of old masters (Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith) and newer iconoclasts (Rage Against the Machine, L7, Marilyn Manson).
The casting pulls off a similar trick. Harrelson was best known for playing the slow-witted Woody in TV’s Cheers, but he is magnetic as the despicable Mickey. Lewis, who was already carving out an impressively offbeat career in indie cinema, is even better, turning from abused teen to avenging outlaw on a dime.
They are joined by Downey Jnr (complete with terrible Australian accent), Tommy Lee Jones and Tom Sizemore, all playing heightened versions of abusive men in power.
Because these secondary characters are so unrelentingly repellent, the only people to root for are the two leads. We even see a teenager admitting, “If I were a mass murderer, I’d be Mickey and Mallory.”
The way the violence is presented invites such complicity. During the opening shoot-out at a diner, Mickey waves a gun at the waitress in front of the camera. When he pulls the trigger, it feels like we are doing it too. It may be exciting, but it is a seriously mixed message. Is the film colluding in the very thing it seems to condemn?
Upon release, critics were outraged and Tarantino hated it so much he could not watch it all the way through.
It was also implicated in a series of copycat crimes, the most infamous of which was the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the US state of Colorado, whose teenage perpetrators used the code NBK, an initialism for Natural Born Killers, in their planning.
It is easy to see why the film might connect with the disenfranchised and damaged. It is a work of real power, but scant meaning; less a coherent statement than a semi-crazed rant at the awful state of, well, everything, especially the media. Indeed, rarely has so much been employed to say so little.
Gale calls his brand of tabloid programme making “junk food for the brains” and is frequently intercut with images of the devil. Mickey tells him, “Killing you and what you represent is … a statement. I’m not a hundred per cent sure exactly what it’s saying but, you know ….”
The problem is, the film is just as confused.
Stone’s experiential assault may have seemed revolutionary at the time, but using mass-media techniques to criticise the emptiness of mass media does not feel quite so clever these days.
After the initial sugar rush wears off, it is like being repeatedly bludgeoned with a cartoon sledgehammer, canned laughter and all.