True Romance (1993)

The King, Chiba, White Boy Day and Love…Bloody Love.
True Romance is directed by Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Michael Rapaport, Christopher Walken, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Bronson Pinchot and Saul Rubinek. Music is by Hans Zimmer and cinematography by Jeffery L. Kimball.
Comic book store clerk Clarence Worley (Slater) falls in love with call girl Alabama Whitman (Arquette) when she turns up at the movie theatre as one of his birthday presents. Marriage is quick but as the whirlwind romance gathers apace, complications quickly follow in the form of psycho drug dealers and the mob!
It's still speculated on how True Romance would have panned out had Tarantino directed his own screenplay, but really in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter. For True Romance is a wildly exciting fusion of lovers on the lam premise with violence a go go thrills.
Director Scott did a bang up job bringing Tarantino's screenplay to life, even making a couple of narrative changes that suits (QT agrees) the picture no end. People often get hung up on the fact that Scott had previously helmed Top Gun, Beverly hills Cop II and Days of Thunder, citing these as reasons that Scott was wrong for the material, yet the film he did immediately before True Romance was The Last Boy Scout, a thrilling and muscular actioner that pings with sharp savvy dialogue scripted by Shane Black. It was the perfect trial run for True Romance, and Scott proved to be a wise and cohesive choice for the material. He also expertly marshalled a large ensemble cast, garnering career high turns from Slater and Arquette in the process.
Almost everything clicks into place on True Romance, it never lacks for kinetic thrills or edge of the seat drama. In turn it likes to grab you around the throat with some wince inducing violence, cunningly drawing you in to root for a couple of lovers who will do anything for each other, while simultaneously causing carnage for all they come into contact with. There's odd ball characters galore (Oldman and Pitt excelling in this area), exquisite set-pieces and dialogue so sharp you could cut a steak with it. From conversations between Clarence and his imaginary Elvis (Kilmer) mentor, to iconography unbound with one of the 90s great sequences that sees Walken's mob boss verbally joust with Hopper as Clarence's stoic father, it's a film as rich in the art of vocal acting as it is in eye splintering gloss. All that and it's a clinically beautiful love story as well!
A wet dream fantasy of QT for sure, and if you wanna be churlish? Then there should have been more room made for Sizemore and Penn's glorious coppers. Hell we could even complain about the editing being a touch too slam-bang at times…But nah! Small complaints be damned, the meeting of Tarantino the writer and Scott the director delivers neo-noir goodies galore. In fact it's a film that just gets better with age. 9/10

**A film where love is unbelievable, the characters are unlikely, and the action scenes are brutal and quite intense.**
This is one of those films that you shouldn't watch with your family: it's full of violent scenes, foul dialogue full of profanity, several sex scenes, among other heavy features. The story isn't exactly nice either: during his birthday, a seemingly ordinary man meets a seductive woman and the two get very involved. We learn that she is a prostitute, and was hired to be with him that night. They decide to escape, but are forced to kill her pimp and take with them a suitcase full of pure cocaine.
For me, the film's biggest problem wasn't the violence (Tarantino uses it regularly and is considered brilliant), but rather the implausibility of the story: I wouldn't believe in love at first sight with a prostitute, I find the idea implausible, and the same can be said about the idea of a frail boy, with a perfectly ordinary life, becoming in a few hours a brutal murderer and potential drug dealer. These are things that don't fit, but that the film takes advantage of to create a kind of “Romeo and Juliet Bang Bang”.
There are several well-known names in the cast. For me, the best performance came from Gary Oldman, who is extraordinarily good in the role of a violent pimp. I wish that his participation was not so brief. Patricia Arquette is sexy when she's almost naked, and that was put to full use. As an actress, she did what she could, but she was given such bad material and such an unbelievable character that she couldn't do much. In turn, Christian Slater is not a good actor. At least, I think that he lost itself a lot after “Name of the Rose”. Here, he keeps the same persona he presented in “Heathers”, but without such an intelligent script to base it on. The actor did the job that was possible with bad material and a very bad character. Chris Walken is good in the role of the big villain: he knows how to be cold and appear threatening. Val Kilmer and Brad Pitt make brief appearances, but I doubt they want to remember this work, where they were very far from the shape we are used to.
Technically, the film stands out for the avalanche of good special effects it used in the action and shooting scenes, which are deeply crafted and stylized. Fans of action films will definitely enjoy this, and the climactic scene is worthy of an anthology. The rest ends up not really interesting and not having much relevance.