Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

I have been inclined to stave off seeing this Stone-Tarantino collaboration for a long time, suspecting an unholy marriage of sententious cant and puerile trash culture references, which would be the worst that both parties bring to the table. Yet even Stone has turned out some decent films over the years, although one now has to go back quite a way to find them. You still can't help thinking that a Stone script from yesteryear, with an actual polemic core, processed through Tarantino's superior presentational technique, would have made much more sense. As it is, the film, a sort of hypercharged black comedy run-through of Badlands, jostled along frenetically by a barrage of clips and stylistic grabs from cinematic and news history, is like a garish B-movie that tells you off for being a slave to instant gratification and moralises about violence in the media while instantly gratifying you and churning out ultraviolence. It's at once compelling and intensely irritating.

6/10