"Stealing, Cheating, Killing. Who said romance is dead?"

True Romance (1993): 6/10

Poster (c) Warner Bros.

As much as I love Quentin Tarantino (well...love his movies), he does get pretty pretentious at times. One prime example was Kill Bill: Volume Two, where he thinks his dialogue is so good that he forgets that it's only good dialogue in a Tarantino fashion if it's funny, also. The same thing happened to True Romance. Often, Tarantino's writing is memorable, making his movies memorable and immortal. Although I'm behind on reviews, so I saw this movie a few weeks ago, I remember almost nothing from this film. There are some speeches characters give that could go down next to the "Royale with Cheese" sequence from Pulp Fiction, but, alas, they don't for a variety of reasons.

Clarence (Christian Slater) is a typical loser. His boss hires prostitute Alabama (Patricia Arquette) to have sex with him on his birthday, and before they know it, they're married. Clarence kills her pimp (Gary Oldman), steals cocaine from him, and goes to Hollywood looking to sell it. The pimp's men go out to chase them. What an exciting story.

I'm not going to blame it all on Tarantino. Much of the problem should be directed to director Tony Scott. You may remember him as being the one who took a possibility for a great movie called Man on Fire, chewed it up, spit it back out, and turned it into total crap. He shows more restraint here, making True Romance bearable and, at times, exciting. But nothing in it is memorable-the shootoff in Reservoir Dogs (which wasn't memorable per se) was more memorable. The characters weren't memorable, the scenes and speeches weren't memorable, and most of the movie wasn't memorable. I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm making True Romance out to be this awful movie. It really isn't.

Some of the movie was interesting (for then), and there's a great scene between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. It doesn't resonate with me now, but as I was watching the movie, I was thinking how cool it was. While the characters weren't really defined much, they were acted well throughout. Samuel L. Jackson could have done more, though. Then again, Sam Jackson eating cottage cheese is exciting for me. But I digress. True Romance is nowhere near the potential Tarantino has, but if you watch it, you'll probably enjoy it. But don't think about it afterwards or you'll not like it as much.

Rated R for violence, language, and drug use.

Review Date: June 15, 2004