Review
by Bob Ignizio
Although
best known for serious dramas, many of them loosely based on factual
events and persons, Oliver Stone does occasionally make films that
aim for nothing more than entertainment and visceral thrills. Early
in his career, he wrote and directed a pair of horror films (SEIZURE
and THE HAND), and he
returned to genre filmmaking in the nineties with U-TURN
and NATURAL BORN KILLERS.
He heads back to genre territory once again in his latest film
SAVAGES, based on the
novel by Don Winslow, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Stone and
Shane Salerno.
The film begins
with a voice over by O (Blake Lively), who tells us that just because
she's telling the story, that doesn't mean she'll be alive at the
end. O explains that she is the kept woman of two pot dealers. Chon
(Taylor Kitsch) is an Operation Desert Storm vet with a damaged
psyche; Ben (Aaron Johnson) an the idealistic hippie type who wants
to save the world. Not only are these two unlikely friends, they have
no problem sharing the same woman. It is implied, though never really
followed up on, that the two must love each other more than O in
order to be happy with this arrangement.
Nonetheless, these
three do appear to be happy, and why shouldn't they? Thanks to the
seeds Chon brought back from Afghanistan and Ben's knowledge of
botany, they have the best weed in the world. Business is booming,
allowing them to live a life of luxury. Unfortunately, their product
has also attracted the attention of a Mexican drug cartel headed by
Elena Sanchez (Salma Hayek). When Chon and Ben refuse to partner with
Sanchez, she has her henchman Lado (Benecio del Toro) kidnap O. Chon
figures that even if they do what Elena asks, O will die anyway. So
with the unwilling help of a corrupt DEA agent (John Travolta), Chon
and Ben set about trying to get O back themselves.
The problem isn't
with the plot, but with the execution. For starters, the incessant
narration is almost completely unnecessary, often telling us things
that are right up there on the screen. All it does is bring O front
and center as the audience surrogate, which drives home just how
uninteresting a character she is and how bland a performance Lively
gives. Not that her two co-stars are anything to write home about,
either. Kitsch gives yet another one-note performance here, although
to be fair that's pretty much how the character is written, and
Kitsch does at least hit that one note with more subtlety than he did
in BATTLESHIP. Johnson fares the best of the three leads, both
in terms of having a better written character and the actual
performance itself, but his character is still far from being a
compelling protagonist. At least the supporting cast is fun, with
Travolta, Hayek, and del Toro all playing it a little campier than
the leads.
The biggest
problem with SAVAGES, though, is its complete lack of
momentum. It's a ninety minute B movie stretched out to fit a 2
hour-plus running time. As if to underscore the point, the film
engages in a bit of third act gimmickry that actually throws the
picture into reverse. On top of that, despite the pulpy subject
matter, lurid violence, and kinky sex, the film takes itself too
seriously, and for that to work it needs to have more thematic
weight. There's some attempt to show how the drug business will force
even the altruistic hippies like Johnson and O to get their hands
dirty, but it doesn't really follow through on that, and you get no
sense that any of the characters have substantially changed in the
end. 2 out of 4 stars.
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