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USA 1993
Directed by
Tony Scott
120 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

True Romance

I’m not sure when Christian Slater started his career slide into obscurity but in 1993 he could manage top billing in a extraordinary cast that included Dennis Hopper,Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, Tom Sizemore and Samuel L. Jackson (as well as Chris Penn and Michael Rapaport). OK, they had relatively small parts (we don’t even see Kilmer’s face) but top billing is top billing.  

Slater plays Clarence Worley, a Detroit comic store clerk who worships Elvis and low-budget Kung Fu movies. On the night of his birthday his boss, as bosses in Detroit apparently do, arranges a night for him with a call-girl, Alabama (Patricia Arquette). The two fall in love and decide to get married. Clarence decides to straighten out Alabama's pimp (Gary Oldman), ends up killing him and in the process picks up a suitcase of uncut cocaine that belongs to  mob boss Vincenzo Coccoti (Christopher Walken). Clarence and Alabama head to California to sell the coke but little do they know that the mob is after them.

The first thing that you need to know about True Romance is that the script is by Quentin Tarantino, who had made a successful directorial debut the previous year with Reservoir Dogs and whose breakthrough hit, Pulp Fiction, was a year away. His wiseguy attitude is well in evidence here with trademark fast-paced banter, crude sexism and lashings of graphic blood-splattered violence, the latter amusingly brought to a head in a climatic shoot-out between cops, minders and mob enforcers that in true B grade style only the leads survive.

The second thing you need to know is that the film was directed by Tony Scott, a studio director best known at that time for Top Gun (1986) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). Scott doesn’t make a total hash of it, the aforementioned gun battle and a confrontation between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper being high points but there is an over-produced quality to the film that ill-suits Tarantino’s street smarts.

Most of this miscegenation occurs over the relationship between Clarence and Alabama, which, in complete contradiction to Tarantino’s script, Scott manages to make look like some kind of teen romance. Hard not to do with pretty boy Slater and the physically voluptuous but fairy floss sweet Arquette in the lead (both stand up remarkably well to comprehensive beating, Arquette especially), but it still comes down to Scott’s glossy mainstream varnishing which when it doesn’t work, as with the cheesy ending, looks just plain tacky. With the hindsight of Pulp Fiction we can imagine how much better Tarantino himself would have realized the material.

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