In many ways the new Oliver Stone-directed SAVAGES is a throwback, both into Stone's past and to a type of film that at once glorifies and horrifies the drug-dealer lifestyle. Your must remember that Stone not only directed such works as PLATOON, WALL STREET, BORN OF THE FOURTH OF JULY, and JFK, but he also wrote SCARFACE and followed that us with directing turns on NATURAL BORN KILLERS and U-TURN. It's all coming back to you now, isn't it? With a screenplay credited to Stone, Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (based on his novel), SAVAGES at its worst is aping those latter Stone works, but at its best it offers a twisting and turning, depraved and dirty experience that is not often predictable and very often a whole lot of fucked-up fun.
At the heart of the film are three people, all in love with each other. Our narrator is "O" (Blake Lively), a pretty woman with a free-love spirit but a taste for expensive things. She's living with two drug-dealing partners, Ben (KICK-ASS' Aaron Johnson), who came up with the strain of marijuana they sell but also uses a portion of their earnings for charitable purposes; he's a lover not a fighter. Then there's Chon (Taylor Kitsch of JOHN CARTER and BATTLESHIP fame), a former Afghanistan vet, who still has a paranoid mind and a violent temper. He's in charge of security, and he's an aggressive lover compared to Ben. Yes, O is sleeping with both of them (sometimes at once), and everybody's cool like that.
I'll admit, in the beginning of this film, I was quickly losing interest because I don't tolerate hippie behavior for more than 30 seconds. But then come the Mexicans (under the command of Elena, played with quiet ferocity by Salma Hayek) and their hyper-violent cartels. Benicio Del Toro is in rare form as the so-despicable-you-love-him enforcer Lado. His methods are unspeakable, and he excels at cruelty. But it's Alex (last year's Oscar nominee Demián Bichir) who Elena calls on to negotiate with Ben and Chon about taking over their business and expanding their market. Ben and Chon want to get out of the business, take the money, and retire in style. But the cartel wants them to stay on for three years to train its employees in the ways of growing premium shit. Also drifting in and out of the crevices and playing every side of the game is DEA agent Dennis (John Travolta, who screams a lot). And keep an eye out for Emile Hirsch as Ben and Chon's combination accountant and resident hacker.
When the boys balk at the first offer from Alex, Elena does not take kindly to people turning down reasonable offers, so she has Lado kidnap O and sets up a type of pay/release plan. Since O is the one thing these two knuckleheads love, they devise a plan to get her back while knocking the cartel down a peg or two. SAVAGES succeeds in giving out bloody battles, deviant behavior, double crosses and sometimes surreal visuals that remind me of the loopy use of different film stock that used to be Stone's trademark (like it or not). Here, it tends to work, and above all other things, I think Stone is having some amount of fun making this movie, and I certainly had fun watching where he took it.
Not everything works. Lively's constant narration is a bit irritating, and her acting isn't much better, although I think it was more the character than her performance that grated my nerves. Johnson does a great job as the more passive partner in the business whose violent side is drawn out and used to great effect as the film goes on. Kitsch may have finally found his strong suit as the tightly wound Chon, who just happens to have a small army for former military buddies at his disposal for some of the pair's most elaborate missions against he cartel.
By the end of the film, it becomes more and more difficult to figure out who's lying to whom, who wants to kill what, and what day of the week it is. But most of the details are insignificant as Stone turns up the weird factor by floating Mexican Day of the Dead images before our eyes and floods trippy music into our ears. I'm not saying he abandons the plot entirely (he doesn't), but there are times when stylistic flare seems to be battling for our attention. But that's no unusual in film by Oliver Stone, a filmmaker I happen to adore, even when he's failing or flailing. With SAVAGES, it's nice to see a master back at work and tapping into a lunatic energy that he used to employ far more often, and as a result, he took more chances. This film feels like something of a risk, and more often than not, it pays off richly.
