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Derek Malcolm's rating
Badlands is like complex Bonnie and Clyde
By
Derek Malcolm
28 Aug 2008
“Suppose I shoot you, how’d that be?” says Martin Sheen’s polite if bloody killer in Terrence Malick’s disturbing 1974 debut, based the story of Charles Starkweather, a young man who went on a killing spree in the Dakota badlands of the Fifties.
It’s a film with reminders of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, since Starkweather (here called Kit) had a mutually destructive romantic relationship with a lonely young schoolgirl, played by Sissy Spacek.
It is, however, far more complex, showing an idyllic natural world corrupted by the bullet-ridden bodies of Starkweather’s victims. The superb performances from Sheen and Spacek are as memorable as Malick’s vision of something akin to hell.
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