peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2017 06 09 Badlands

Badlands (1973)

Fri, Jun 09, 2017./noise/movies | Link

Second time around with Terrence Malick's debut that was a proforma for the many Bonnie and Clydes that followed. There's even something of Natural Born Killers here; perhaps Oliver Stone was remaking the movies that made Martin Sheen a star. As always there was some great cinematography. I wasn't so convinced by Sissy Spacek, and I needed to be for the thing to be more than a piece of fluff. Sheen is so young and gets compared with James Dean. His character is the opposite of Jim Caviezel's in The Thin Red Line; just as lost but with nothing on the inside. The plot is a bit crap, the characters just cardboard.