Goes on a bit. The suits who wanted to cut it down were on to something. It could have been shortened by about 25%. The violence ceased to be disturbing after a while. Screen violence is never really convincing, since one knows it is just a movie, and before long here it just washed over my head, and grew tedious. Only psychological torture actually hurts. The psychology here is limited to rather soppy romance, except in the case of Mallory's repulsive father, who got what was coming to him. The message of killing being naturally born was plain enough.Juliette Lewis was good in her part, and Woody Harrelson was OK in a less demanding role. However, Robert Downey Jnr, and the rest of the cast, when it came to the prison riot, were little more than a multiple pain in the neck. This was especially true of Downey and his twitchy face, which became exceedingly annoying and irritating. His would-be Australian accent seemed utterly pointless. The riot went on and on to no purpose, and while it may have entertained the public, when shown on television, it soon ceased to entertain me. The prolonged trippy, psychedelic style grew wearisome, as well. One watch, no more.

This movie try to be exciting bur it isn't. It is boring and just "free violence" without any sense or logic. The criticism of media is just empty. Nothing is profound or have any reason to happen. Is just waste time. I don't know how this movie wins any award because to me is one of the most trash and bizarre that I ever seen.

I rented the director's cut and I'm trying to figure out what's the difference between the cuts, apart from being four minutes longer. Anyway, since I have only seen this cut, so I'll just have to go with this one. I was mostly interested in this film because of the original script written by Tarantino. Apparently the original however was heavily edited by Veloz, Rutowski and Stone, so I don't know what parts of Tarantino are actually left. I'd really like to read the original script, but I don't know if that's even possible.My dad actually gave me a warning of this film. He said it was extremely heavy and distressing. It definitely is, and during some parts of the film it's done marvellously. The beginning of the film is a good example. The dialogue in that is pretty regular, it could be the beginning of any movie. The dialogue is something we could hear everyday, that's not what makes it distressing. That's done with the music. I've never liked Leonard Cohen's music, but it definitely spices up movies by making scenes extra creepy. I've had the soundtrack of this movie for a while, and most of the songs sounded extremely good, but when I saw the actual film I was slightly disappointed. Apart from few, like Leonard Cohen in the beginning, many of the tracks are easy to ignore, as they give nothing to the actual story. They just are playing in the background. If Tarantino had got to direct the movie his way, the soundtrack would've been so much better.Also the cinematography makes the film unnerving. Fast shots, camera is tilted, some shots are in black and white... Let alone all the small symbolic things in between what's actually happening. The writing could be almost anything, cinematography like that does everything else. I've seen the same kind of visual side in Slipstream (2007). That movie was complicated anyway, so the symbolic fast shots of something random suited the film. The plot of Natural Born Killers isn't complicated. All that symbolism gets lost when the film isn't watched by someone who actually knows about symbols. Everyday watchers won't have time to analyse what a snake here and there means. If Oliver Stone didn't mean this movie to be watched by someone who doesn't want to analyse every little detail as an important symbol, he's pretentious. The way this film was shot is good: tilted shots, fast shots, black and white shots, the colours... Those work. But like getting random shots of something isn't always that necessary. It's kind of like Stone wanted this film to be way more artistic than this plot could be. The story is artistic in the way how it can be analysed, but that's it. There's no need to make it an art film. I wanted to like this movie, but it's hard. While it had everything I usually like in films, it felt too pretentious and overtly complicated. I was expecting something so much simpler and therefore so much better. And that's the reason why I'd want to see what Tarantino originally had. He's an excellent writer, and I feel like his original story was made into something needlessly weird. When you think about it, Natural Born Killers is a good movie, if you judge it like critics do and all that. In technical sense it's excellent and all that, but it's annoying to watch. Natural Born Killers isn't something you can just throw into the DVD-player and watch it when you have nothing better to do, you have to really, really watch it, and that might ruin a film a little. If it's on TV, you can't just start in the middle if you missed the beginning and so on. While I appreciate what this film is, I can't say I actually like it.

Watched this movie back in 1994 when it was released (and I was 18 or so) and again just recently when it ran on IFC. At the time of its release I thought NBK was "meh." Now with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight I think it's a bit of a disaster.There are several problems with NBK but the biggest issue is that it's a total failure as satire. I get the sense that Oliver Stone intended to satirize the media's infatuation with and exploitation of true crime stories and serial killers. This would be fine if Stone himself didn't completely romanticize and even mythologize Mickey and Mallory, the young killer protagonists of this film.I kept waiting for Stone to contrast the ugliness of their crimes with the spectacular way they are presented by the media. No such luck. Instead, all of their victims are shown to be disgusting human beings who deserve their fate. The highly stylized way the violence is meted out adds to the sense that we're supposed to be rooting for these two murderers and to view them as the victims of the film.In a nutshell, Stone is guilty of the same sensationalism he pretends to condemn in this film. The tone is all wrong and we the audience are never sure whose side we're supposed to be on or why.Aside from this huge creative miscalculation, the movie is wildly overedited and constantly shifting from black and white to color to odd angles etc. This is mostly annoying and didn't add anything to the film. The main story is also totally clichéd and the film doesn't even work on the level of satisfying exploitation, featuring far less violence or sexuality than I expected.Overall just plain bad.