Crazy fun (even without Tarantino's direction)

Rating: 8/10 (11 June 2010)

Quentin Tarantino is not in the director's chair, but True Romance feels almost entirely like his product. It has all the trademarks of the auteur he would amount to in the years that followed; the film is delightfully hammy, sprinkled with amusing banner which shows (among other things) a love for the cinema. It has a dose of Asian cinema to it, and the violence, while gratuitous, is effectively satirical. It features a cast of highly familiar faces, some who can act some who can't, but everybody pulls their weight here, and nobody upstages anybody else.
In scene one, Chrisitian Slater sits at a bar and tells the girl next to him how he wishes he could be Elvis. It is ironic considering he got his wish seven years later, backing up Kevin Costner in 3000 Miles to Graceland. Tarantino loves bar scenes. Were he in the director's chair, this intro would be longer.
So who IS in the director's chair then? True Romance is a film by Tony Scott, (who probably needs no introduction). Tarantino would surely not give his script to anyone unless he felt they would match his vision or intended approach. Scott clearly achieves this. The movie is played mostly for fun, yet it doesn't get carried away. Scott's direction is progressive. Tarantino films are much more slower. Even though True Romance gets increasingly more convoluted, so to does it get funnier, and it comes with a pretty good pay off.
True Romance is definitely a forerunner to Pulp Fiction. Back in 1992, this would've been a good hint to the critics of what was to come from Quentin Tarantino. Pulp Fiction was definitely his most inventive feature, but True Romance may be more fun.