Goons Go Gun Crazy

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: TRUE ROMANCE

DIRECTOR: TONY SCOTT

WRITER: QUENTIN TARANTINO

THE BOTTOM LINE: And Bonnie and Clyde go to L.A.: this corpse opera takes the low road, but with high craft.

If shoot-'em-up, gobble-'em-down movies like The Fugitive and Jurassic Park are rated PG-13 these days, what does an R-rated action adventure look like? Like True Romance: violent to a fault, glam to the max.

Writer Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) and director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II) must have figured: If we're gonna get an R, then dammit, let's make an R. For a while, True Romance had the restrictive NC-17 rating, and there's still enough carnage in the R version to make an audience wince out loud. A white drug dealer perforates some black thugs. Palms get sliced, feet corkscrewed, skulls smashed with toilet-tank lids, eyes and other essential organs blown out. The movie climaxes with a dozen or so thugs, druggies, cops -- and that lowest form of slime mold, a movie producer -- edgily pointing heavy artillery at one another.

Only the most desperate scavengers would trawl for a story line in this swamp of sensation, but here goes. Clarence (Christian Slater) works in a Detroit comic-book store. It's his birthday, and as a present his boss has bought him a surprise call girl, Alabama (Patricia Arquette). She may vaguely aspire to be Melanie Griffith, and if Clarence hopes to travel abroad, it is only because he "always wanted to see what TV in other countries looked like"; but this is true romance. The two must marry, run into some mortal trouble (Gary Oldman as a drug dealer, Christopher Walken as a Mafia don) and flee -- with the surprise package of a suitcase full of cocaine -- to Los Angeles. Their moral code is hardly more righteous than that of their pursuers, but they're on their way, down a white-brick road toward the end of the rainbow. You kind of know Elvis will be there.

If you believe for a moment that True Romance is a character study, you must be one of the actors in it. For the audience it's a vivid exercise in style. Or more precisely, an exercise in fashion. Scott made his name directing British TV spots; he can make each image yummy, seductive, good enough to buy, whether the scene is selling sex, violence or some slick sociopathic blend of the two. He pummels your eye with wide-screen close-ups that eroticize violence and give a lurid threat to the sex. The love scene is a French- kissin', torso-lickin' jeans ad set to cinema. In the big shoot-out at the end, bloody cushion feathers smother the screen in slo-mo.

The performers, especially Walken, Oldman and Saul Rubinek as the producer, do everything in big-mo. In its acting as well as its writing and direction, this is a live-action cartoon, a fantasy (and a sidewise critique) of machismo. It's a crimson fresco of smart people playing evil ones. The whole enterprise is noisy as hell, but you know it's there.