Natural Born Killers Critic Reviews

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

Natural Born Killers is going to be a love-it or hate-it film. But it's an important film. Pumped up, jumped up, yet asking the right questions, [it] is more than an attention-grabber. It's a grenade pitched into the media tent. [26 Aug 1994, p.51]Read the full review

An entertaining but exhausting satire on tabloid media and the way they feed our thirst for violence, Natural Born Killers stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, in banshee-out-of-hell performances, as serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox -- a trashy, gonzo/weirdo version of Bonnie & Clyde. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]Read the full review

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.Read the full review

Natural Born Killers is both audacious and astonishing, a vision of a charnel house apocalypse that comes close to defying description. [26 Aug 1994, p.1]Read the full review

Flashily nihilistic Killers is easier to admire than love, but credit Stone for putting it on the line with a yarn tailor-made for his hopped-up vision of media-engendered white-trash immortality. [26 Aug 1994, p.1D]Read the full review

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.Read the full review

A brilliant mess, I suppose, in the way that seriously disturbed people can sometimes deliver a briefly mesmerizing vision of the universe while babbling. If nothing else, Natural Born Killers is the most in-your-face movie ever released by a major Hollywood studio. [25 Aug 1994, p.A10]Read the full review