Sleazy, mindless trash

Rating: 2/10 (16 February 2000)

(Minor spoilers)
Tarantinolatry got so out of hand during the '90s that a number of people actually took this absurd movie for a masterstroke, even though Tarantino only wrote the screenplay for it.
Clarence Worley is a nebbish who meets Alabama who is (sigh) a Hooker With A Heart Of Gold. They decide to get married. It becomes necessary to kill Alabama's pimp, Drexl (Gary Oldman, whose amusing performance is one of the few enjoyable moments in the movie) so the pair can be together. However, they decide to grab Drexl's huge stash of cocaine to finance their future together. Needless to say, this causes a plethora of criminals to try to kill them and get the drugs back. Also needless to say, the plethora fails to do so. Clarence magically transforms from a nebbish into a Tough Guy, whose strength is as the strength of ten because he spouts "cool" profanities. When you spout cool profanities, gangsters who are pointing their guns at you do not shoot you when you draw a gun. They just rack their slides menacingly (this cliche is known to bad movie fans as Superfluous Racking).
Clarence and Alabama do not have any interesting or memorable characteristics. There is no reason for the audience to root for them to make it to the end. Who wants to see these two who intend to finance their married life by helping some hapless addict kill himself (or worse, helping to start some kid on the habit), enjoy the fruits of their scheme? Cliche characters alone do not make the movie any worse than an ordinary action movie, but these characters are not just cliches, but unlikeable cliches.

Nor do the supporting characters make any more sense than the leads. Christopher Walken's Vince Coccotti tortures Clarence's father in order to learn where Clarence is, and then, bizarrely, kills him without first gaining any information whatsoever from him. But first, we are subjected to a reprehensible, epithet-laden racist spiel from Clarence's dad, apparently intended to be funny. Unlike in PULP FICTION, where the racial epithets could be excused as not meant to be offensive, there is no question in this case that Clarence's dad, who is being painted as a "good guy" and is intended to engage the audience's sympathy, is deliberately trying to provoke Coccotti by suggesting that he has black ancestors (and it is presumed as a matter of course that an implication of black ancestry is belittling and undesirable). If this were even the slightest bit amusing, it might be forgivable, but it isn't, despite the laughter of the characters on screen which is intended to cue the audience into laughter in much the same way as the canned laughter on a TV sitcom.
TRUE ROMANCE could have been a bland action movie. By ladling on racism, an extra helping of unrealism and stupidity, and characters who are not only unimaginative but also repellent, it makes itself much, much worse. Wish fulfillment movies can be pleasant, even if silly; the shape of Tarantino's wish fulfillment fantasy is disgusting.
Rating: * out of ****.