Clumsy, scattershot and mostly devoid of any real substance, True Romance is a flash in the pan thriller with bits-and-pieces going for it.

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2013)

Nothing in True Romance is especially mature, but that doesn't stop it from being quite the little blast of cine-literate pulp nonsense. Some of it's funny, some of it's actually quite disturbing; most of it has a lot to do with drugs and pimps, and lowlifes killing other lowlifes to an omnipresent rock-'em-sock-'em aesthetic; it's put together in this manner that has it creep along the line of what's acceptable and what isn't, but it works in the long run if for the time you're sitting there watching it. To state that it's one of the best films a certain Tony Scott ever made speaks volumes; to say the likes of those such as Brad Pitt went on to play roles much more interesting in films that were a lot better speaks even greater volumes. Most of the film is good value; very little of it is especially grown-up; it's tone and content, which will sway wildly from stoner comedy to one of the two leads receiving a beating from a mobster in a nasty little scene, just about holds together with this dumb, infectious energy constantly ticking it over in the engine room.
Christian Slater plays Clarence Worley, a store clerk in his twenties; a sensitive and kind, although schizophrenic, man who craves a female presence in his life and talks with great enthusiasm about things that are dear to him, namely comic books; Elvis Presley tracks and import kung-fu films of the 1970s. When I think of a "Clarence", I think of a deliberately dorky looking character in a Gary Larson sketch. He sits at a bar, during the opening scene, and talks to a sex worker about these things, but he's out of his depth - as if he's too nice-a guy to be in this zone speaking to this calibre of person, but so starved of anything remotely of Clarence's ilk is the zone within which he's based, that he must resort to such places and people. She is disinterested, but then again of course she is.
Cut to an establishing shot of where we are: a grim looking Detroit with a grey cloud over it and a generally gloomy atmosphere. Fate appears to deliver an amiable blow when another young sex worker, Patricia Arquette's Alabama, enters the cinema within which Clarence is watching a kung-fu film and sits next to him. They bond, appear to get along and before True Romance's second act can even stretch its legs in preparation to enter the fray, they are married. Clarence is happy he's quashed his desire for someone female and with the apparent interest in what he likes and Alabama's search for some sort of consistency in this, her trek up from far and away Florida, has led her to young Clarence.
Where Slater's character lived for the adventure in his movies, and could only feel passion and love for certain comic books in that he's very protective of certain rare varieties of them, he is now able to direct unto Alabama this enthusiasm to keep something that needs protecting as pristine as possible as well as experience the adventure and dangers abound in his films and comic books. This is born out of what lies within the threatening circles within which Alabama operated prior to knowing Clarence: specifically, her pimp Drexl (Oldman) and the fact he takes issue with this newly formed matrimony. The point of no return is crossed; this first barrier the "new" Clarence must hurdle if he is to live out his fantasies and maintain what it is he's found after years of searching accomplished in his killing of Drexl. Once carried out, the pair of them head for Los Angeles out of the fact somewhat skewered twist of fate that saw Clarence grab a case of cocaine upon leaving Drexl's abode, with the mobsters (the true owners of the drugs) out looking for it too.
It's no secret the film loses a lot of its energy and verve upon its arrival in California; primarily out of the fact they get there too quickly and the early poking around under this cloud of gloom and apparent despair as a young guy and a young girl fall in love and try to work around this psychotic pimp is quite good. I've never been fond of crime films set in sunny, bright nor indeed welcoming locales, but what's lacking here is much for Clarence and Alabama to actually get up to. We do not, to the film's ultimate detriment, have the leads' journey to L.A. depicted; a passage of time rife with the potential for dramatic ingredients and the opportunity for a stone-wall antagonist to establish themselves so that it might provide these two leads something to do. There is the potential for this sort of material, in that Christopher Walken plays the boss of a group of these mobsters looking for their cocaine, whose verbal standoff with Clarence's father as he strives to find where they've gone calls to mind the best of what True Romance writer Tarantino can do: think the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds or the final scenes of Pulp Fiction. Alas, he disappears after this one sequence. Credit must go to Christian Slater, who does well in his depiction of someone going from being this weak clerk to a hardened guy having to punch well above his weight, but the film lacks any sort of backbone. Its persistency to use Malick's overture from Badlands serves only to remind us how good that film was, whereas with hindsight, one is able to point out how Tarantino forged an early forte out of depicting partnerships, or couples, dodging bullets and doing crime as apparent in Natural Born Killers; From Dusk 'til Dawn or strands of Pulp Fiction. This is the lesser of the four, and not particularly brilliant as a standalone film either.