My Descent Into Madness: True Romance (1993)

  For the second film in a row, Tony Scott gets overshadowed by his screenwriter.  Though in fairness to Scott, it’s hard for anyone to not be overshadowed when the screenwriter is Quentin Tarantino (Oliver Stone managed to do it with Natural Born Killers, but that’s largely because no one but Oliver Stone wanted to be associated with the final product).  The film is stuffed with “cool” dialogue, pop culture references and plenty of violence, just like everything Tarantino has ever written.  The babes are hot, the cars are classics, and the guns are plentiful.  And every last second of it works. 

  True Romance is generally considered by critics to be Tony Scott’s best film.  And rightfully so, as it is one of those rare instances where everything just falls together.  Scott’s direction has the flash to match Tarantino’s script, and the cast is overloaded with talent.  Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette (who seems out to prove that she’s hotter than her sister)

Suck it, Rosanna!

do good work serving as our guides through a plot that allows characters to enter the film, rock one or two great scenes, then exit to make way for the next actor in line.  It’s hard to pick out any individual scene as the film’s highlight, though if a vote were taken it would likely be the onscreen pairing of Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, who share a tense interrogation scene in a dimly lit mobile home (with rays of light shining in through the windows, in case you forgot who was directing).  But on that same level of quality are scenes with Gary Oldman as a very intimidating drug dealer and pimp,

"I carried this watch...wait, which
Tarantino film is this one again?"

Brad Pitt as the greatest stoner ever put on film, James Gandolfini as a henchman who is not at all afraid to hit a woman, and a massive climactic shootout that Scott would later repeat in several of his films (and which Tarantino himself had already used in Reservoir Dogs).  And that’s just scraping the surface.  Samuel L. Jackson, Bronson Pinchot, Saul Rubinek, Michael Rapaport, Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore are there, too, along with a host of great character actors including Kevin Corrigan, Ed Lauter, and Paul Ben-Victor (aka Spiros 'Vondas' Vondopoulos, and if you don’t know what that name means then you are missing out).  Also Val Kilmer plays the ghost of Elvis Presley.  Go ahead, reread that last line.


Trivia & Whatnot:

• True Romance and Natural Born Killers were originally a single massive screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary (who also co-wrote Pulp Fiction together).
• Tarantino based Saul Rubinek’s movie mogul character on Oliver Stone, whom Tarantino had a grudge against after developing Natural Born Killers.  Likewise, when it came time to film, Tony Scott had Rubinek portray the character as a caricature of producer Joel Silver, whom Scott had a grudge against after working together on The Last Boy Scout.
• Jack Black appears in a deleted scene, because the cast clearly needed more people.