True Romance at Cultplex
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
What happens when you let a young Quentin Tarantino write a whirlwind romance? You get a meet-cute at a kung fu marathon, where a nerdy film fan (Christian Slater) meets the blonde bombshell of his dreams (Patricia Arquette), only to have to hightail it out of town when her violent pimp takes exception.
Working from Tarantino’s script, Tony Scott sends his movie-mad couple barrelling towards Hollywood (where else?) tangling their fates with all manner of gangsters, stoners, junkies, movie execs and drug dealers along the way. It’s a slickly worked pop-thriller assisted no end by Hans Zimmer’s bouncy score, which adds an air of fairy-tale destiny to proceedings as our heroes skate through the script’s violent scenarios, their love only emboldened by adversity.
It also helps that Scott populates his film with a dreamy cast — including Christopher Walken, Brad Pitt, Dennis Hopper, James Gandolfini, and Gary Oldman as the aforementioned pimp — who thrive while chewing on the now trademark Tarantino dialogue.
