True Romance Movie
True Romance Film
As a director, Quentin Tarantino is a cash cow. Just three of his feature films (Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, and Pulp Fiction) have earned nearly a billion dollars at the box office. He is something of a critical darling, though he has his detractors. There are Tarantino fan boys and girls all over the world, itching to plop down twenty bucks to see anything with his name attached. The True Romance movie, is a 1993 romantic-comedy crime action flick penned by Tarantino but directed by Tony Scott, came well before Tarantino's mainstream success. Had this film appeared after 1994's Pulp Fiction, there's no telling how much cash it would have earned.
True Romance at the Box Office
As it was, the True Romance film appeared well before the Tarantino buzz that makes anything Quentin-oriented a sure thing. Yes, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs appeared in 1992, a year before True Romance, but that movie wasn't so much a box office success as it was a favorite of critics and a movie with a strong cult following. The True Romance movie didn't even make enough at the box office to cover its ridiculous $12.5 million budget. But box office success is not always a barometer of a film's cultural worth. Called "dynamite" and "dynamic" by critics, True Romance moves along with the pace of a bottle rocket, exploding our conventions about romantic comedy even as it holds up the action film as a valuable and engaging genre. Not all action movies can be Indiana Jones . . . then again, they don't have to be The Last Action Hero or Judge Dredd either.
True Romance Tarantino
Tarantino wanted to shoot the True Romance film on his own. He even shot a full-length early version, called My Best Friend's Birthday, in 1987. Sadly, most of that film was destroyed in a lab fire during editing. Lucky for Tarantino, and lucky for fans of good cinema, the screenplay for that long lost film was adapted into what we now know as True Romance. Tarantino doesn't often write for someone else -- he usually writes and directs his own work -- but this film came at a weird time for Tarantino, and when he ran into difficulties getting money to make the movie, he sold the script.
What can you say . . . the guy needed some cash. The result is strange indeed, Tarantino's trademark dialogue through the frame of a lackluster director. Still, fans of the movies of Quentin Tarantino should check out True Romance, if only to complete their Tarantino collection. There's much to love here, from gruesome action to somewhat tender scenes of love. Though the film would be improved under the capable helm of Quentin Tarantino, it is a joy all the same.