Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 108

32 EVENING STANDARD Ornma Alexander Walker and Joseph Mazeflo with Meiyt Streep before they sail Into of a satirical TV sitcom in which the couple murder her abusive father and mother while the soundtrack rocks with canned studio laughter Likewise the spoof of a true-crime tabloid TV show called American Maniacs This is certainly nearer the Rupert Murdoch-inspired template of such shows but is still a distorting mirror of the kind you find in fairgrounds rather than hold up to real life talent works well on the eye seldom on the brain no coherent argument to follow in his film nothing lasts long lest attention span parts company with the excitement under the strain of having to follow a thesis Though Harrelson and Lewis generate a truly kinetic freakiness blocked conduits when it comes to channelling thought Mysticism enters their brutish lives when the pair unintentionally kill an Indian a kind of primitive guru and their runs Kwercmipte torts out Captured at nd Harretson last they are sent to separate high-security jails Whereupon Stone attempts to show the redemptive power of love to convert perverted pathology into true romance But before a downmarket Bonnie and Clyde can turn into a trash-bucket Romeo and Juliet a prison riot is touched off by the slavering host of American Maniacs (Robert Downey Jnr) who comes to Wild interview prison Jones in life us recognise anything industry all big Like movie Oliver own target is the gross magnification of crime which he alleges is being committed by the media film-making however pointedly exempted The media he says feeds on criminality for its own profit It turns the Mickeys and Mallorys into baleful public heroes The absurd over-reaction that the British media has had to Natural Bom Killers actually argues case more effectively than his movie does Many many thousands more will now see the film as a result of the tabloid storm whipped up by headline writers editorialists and others reacting to publicity before most of them have even had a chance to react to a screening CONSIDERING where blame lies for this not leave out the British film censor With intention or not he delayed certificating Natural Bom Killers until the Government had got an unwelcome and potentially divisive parliamentary debate on the Criminal Justice Bill out of the way By withholding his licence for a public screening James Fer-man thereby exacerbated those who thought this an unwarranted intrusion on freedom of expression but he also encouraged the notion that this was a film that would bring down civilisation What a sick farce it all is: an example of the morality fit into which British public opinion falls or is pushed every time someone makes a face at it film falls into two broken-backed halves The first is a horror-comic road movie recapping the deprived backgrounds of Mickey and Mallory in the torm project manager gomsto co wsoot fHONEDFVY mHE FIRST thing to be said about Oliver NATURAL BORN KILLERS (Cert 18 119 mins) is that no one actually seeing it rather than simply hearkening to the media hysteria and its selfreflexive backlash would take it forreaL Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) the couple of white-trash vagrants on a random killing spree through the Midwest are simply puppets: parodies of hoodlum kids in endless other movies about rebel youth If victims of anything at all as Stone claims of own frenzy of overloaded imagery The pair of them make a killing without calling down on themselves a torrent of movie mythology which knocks the breath out of them and likewise the audience watching them As they drive through the badlands of America slaughtering singly or plurally on impulse and without remorse it is not the country outside you see through the windows of the car or the motel a back-projected flash flood a blink-and-you-miss-it firestorm of iconic movie scenes video highlights telly newscasts comic strips cartoon clips and even commercial logos for products as all-American as 0 Simpson all of them blending into a blur of a violent society a kind of action painting used as a dramatic backdrop executed with all the macho hubris of the artist Jackson Pollock sloshing buckets of paint on his canvases Only intermittently is allowed to stage a breakthrough Even then hallucinogenic highs keep cutting in the way a rush of drugs through the system distorts perception Lest a multiple murder prove too ordinary after a time interrupted for a parodic gag involving a huge bullet whose trajectory we follow the way we did the arrow in a recent comic version of Robin Hood out of the gun barrel through a plate-glass window and into the brain of its soft target To ensure your woman: David Strathaim Mickey in his cell The governor (Tommy Lee for once coarsening his performance to strip-cartoon status) is beheaded The telly celebrity bitten by the bug of joins In the riot until Mickey and Mallory execute him in front of his own camera Those who live by the image die by the Uzi Our two heroes settle down to life with baby in a trailer camp just ordinary Americans Anyone who thinks all this is an inflammation to imitation would also believe Can-dide to be a reliable guide to getting on The fact is the film is less incitement than portent It tells more about insobriety than any society we can around us If about about the intoxication of the new technology on an that lives by hype and too frequently now carries a gun Forrest Gump another that sees life in simple 0500 04 1 995 indeed simpleton terms it uses new tricks in an old format In this case the high-speed digital editing that gives Oliver Stone the capacity to handle a pullulating mass of violent video and celluloid imagery which would defeat the hand and eye of man to put it together with the same impact using the old tools of the trade But by pushing an on-off button on an editing table you actually demote human creativity You end up with an overload of mechanically induced sensations Natural Born Killers is a breathtaking bit of visual display But ask it to stop and think and the machine on which it has been assembled protests that it function that way It relies on an ever-escalating sensationalism to keep going in much the same way as the media that it blames for warping moral perception by exploiting violence has to rely on saturation excess to keep selling its product I see no difference here between the defendant and the prosecution between the media and the man sending the message about its infamous power to distort perception as black as the other Or in this case as bloody OBERT made a and often prl out of cel fcU icanvalm them from their conserved the miah Johnson) environment (AI Through It) incf opportunism (TH exposed constitutr ers (All the Prel preached self-heli (Downhill Racer) the loss of famili nary People) In his latest fi QUIZ SHOW (Cei it is another kind tamination Redfo he has made a be a suspense film honour intelli nic loyalty elii the touchy su lar matters that ally passes conten its search for the The 1950s Paul script at ease in thra ly the lie tui shows bright! fore best ve sums answen tions may nik ir Amer brainy the jac public is that are rig The I'D LIKE lb ORDER SOO CHOCOLATE EGGS umH OUR new TELEPHONE NUMBER INSIDE EACH Easter Sunday is PhONEday when all telephone codes will change business can continue to save money with Mercury phone FreeCall.