Director: Andrew Dominik
Year Released: 2000
Rating: 3.0
This is the film Natural Born Killers was trying to be but failed. Both pictures deal with the sensationalism revolving around serial killers and their immortality (we're still talking about Jack the Ripper), but Stone couldn't convey what Dominik did - that psychopaths are mainly responsible for building up their own image of infamy and then selling it to everyone, thereby acting as their own P.R. people. It plays like black comedy - since the material was written by the biased Chopper himself, Australia's most notorious criminal, we're never sure exactly what happened and what didn't, what's real and what's a gross embellishment. Feels like a super-glossy (the extreme lighting and color-coding makes this one of the most radiant picture since Happy Together) one-act play, with Eric Bana putting on a grand performance as the title character, who can be stabbed by his own friend multiple times - allusions to the Christ and Judas story are obvious - and come out of it alive.
