Penned by the hand of screenplay guru Quentin Tarantino, True Romance is one of those 'on-the-cards' scripts that he had written before he hit the big time with Pulp Fiction. Using the same dialogue intense drama with that splash of black humor, True Romance attempts to capture the essence of a somewhat useless existence and the events that can literally recharge a life.
Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) is just your everyday comic book running clerk who's life is on the fast track to nowhere. Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) is the lucious call girl hired by a friend of Clarences to treat him to a very personal birthday present. Needless to say, they literally fall in love overnight and Alamaba decides to end her few days of the high life.
To do so, she needs to end all ties with her pimp Drexl (Gary Oldman) and asks Clarence to go get her stuff. He does 'end' all her ties with Drexl, he does get a suitcase of stuff and he does leave some ID behind. The problem is, the stuff he got is actually $500,000 worth of Coca COla and he now has a few irate italian mobsters on his tail. The only way to get rid of Dr Shivago is to sell it to a b-grade film director for a measly $200,000.
Needless to say, the italians catch up with them, and so do the feds who have been on their trail. With an ending to rival any gun-fights of recent years, this is sure to please.
You can always expect a certain level of quality but sometimes you have to accept the fact that you can only squeeze so much juice out of the fruit you are handed. What we have here is a decent looking film with a decent transfer. It would have been nice to spread this 2 hour movie across 2 layers and up the bit rate but the quality extracted obviously didn't need anymore room to breathe.
What you'll notice is a not so black image and a not so vibrant image that lacks any dynamic intensity. I can almost put it down to the film itself. It seems gritty and dirty at times and I doubt any amount of digital enhancing could do the image justice without being a detriment to the image itself.
So far this is the only anamorphic print of this movie out there so I doubt you're going to find a better picture.
Surprisingly, for a 2 channel surround track, it was pretty lively in some cases. There is definite channel seperation across the front stereo sound stage which contains a very clear dialogue out of the center channel.
Surround wise, there are passages that delight particularly the rollercoaster scene that uses the surrounds to good effect. Bass wise there is a decent helping that should satisfy.
Be prepared for a little harshness in the final shoot-out though as a compressed dolby digital 2 channel soundtrack cannot do the dynamic range reached real justice.