As legend has it, Roger Avary asked his buddy and fellow video clerk, Quentin Tarantino, to take a look at a script he was writing about two criminals on the run, on the road, and in love. Given free reign to re-work what Avary had put together, Tarantino ended up with a behemoth of a script. Enough in fact for two totally different movies: Natural Born Killers and True Romance. Tarantino sold the rights to both scripts, bought the cherry red convertible that John Travolta would later drive in Pulp Fiction, and went off and made Reservoir Dogs on his own. The rest, they say, is history.
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| The Army jacket = Taxi Driver reference. |
Clarence Worley (Chistian Slater) is lonely, watching a Sonny Chiba kung fu triple feature in a dingy Detroit movie theatre on his birthday. That is, until, a flirty blond bombshell, Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) sidles up next to him. The two spend a dizzy night together, eating pie and talking Nick Fury in the comic book store in which Clarence works. It's love at first sight, so much so, that Alabama is forced to admit that theirs wasn't just a run-of-the-mill meet cute: she's a call girl, sent by Clarence's benevolent boss. But she's soon headed to the Wayne County courthouse for a wedding and, thus, retirement from the world's oldest profession. Spurned by an imagined conversation with his Mentor (i.e., Elvis) (Val Kilmer), Clarence heads to the home of Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman), Alabama's pimp, to "collect her things." Things escalate, Drexl ends up dead, and the suitcase full of "Alabama's things" turns out to be full of cocaine. What else are our heroes to do but to head off to LA and try to move the cola to movie-types? Of course, the mob (Christopher Walken and James Gandolfini) and soon the feds (Tom Sizemore and Chris Penn) are hot on their trial.
So, yeah, its an early Tarantino script in spades: colorful characters with a deep abiding love of pop culture and a deep lack of self-awareness getting mixed up in events over their heads and which almost certainly must end in a Mexican stand-off. With Tony Scott at the helm, however, things move in a more linear, 80's Hollywood action movie fashion than a typical QT outing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Aside from a slightly incongruous Badlands-aping score and Christian Slater's strange dialect choices (instead of mimicking Jack Nicholson for once, he oddly sounds like a Tennessee river boat gambler), the movie hums along like high speed rail.
And it's elevated by some insane supporting turns, where all of your favorite actors show up and take over the film for five to ten minutes. Most famously, Dennis Hopper (as Clarence's dad, Clifford) and Christopher Walken go toe to toe in a slightly tense genealogical lesson. (The entire film is worth it for that scene alone, which is perfectly played by Hopper and Walken and a masterful example of using a character's (and the audience's) inherent bigotry as a weapon.) Brad Pitt has a hilarious turn as Michael Rappaport's stoner roommate, Floyd. Bronson Pinchot (yes, Balky) kills it as the sycophantic Elliot Blitzer. But everyone else pales in comparison to the Gary Oldman, disappearing into the role of a white Jamacian pimp with a milky eye:
It's insane. And worth every damn second.
FINAL VERDICT: KEEPER
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