Savages (2012)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Pot growers Ben and Chon face off against the Mexican drug cartel that kidnapped their shared girlfriend.
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Kitsch, Johnson and Lively are all young, beautiful actors, but they have the combined screen presence of a cactus: During a dinner scene, when Ophelia name-checks Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, your mind drifts for a moment, wondering what Savages might have been like if Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross in these roles.
But in a film that overtly references “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” it’s only natural for the filmmaker to be thinking of other Newman/Redford pictures and how they conclude.
In the novel, Winslow had the gall to blatantly compare their seemingly ill-fated threesome to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (as did Stephen King in a generous pull quote) and the movie makes the same brash connection.
And also by disastrously name-dropping Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , because those people were also glamorous, gorgeous law-breakers - that they were played by better actors and given better things to say in a more entertaining plot is something we are presumably meant to ignore.
And, in what many will recognize as a very Old Bohemian trope (the girl of the trio does indeed bring up " Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid "), they share the affections of O, a beautiful, poor little rich girl ( Blake Lively ).
Pungent, nasty and teeming with colorful crooked types, the writer-director’s most vibrant (and violent) work in some time is a bracingly sordid saga of two young pot growers, the Orange County princess they love and the vicious Mexican cartel they get entangled with; imagine “Jules and Jim” with bombs and beheadings and you’re halfway there.
In fact, before Benicio Del Toro (as the villainous cartel enforcer) and John Travolta (as a double-dealing Drug Enforcement agent) make their hambone entrances, I thought Stone was redoing Truffaut's Jules and Jim: two guys and a girl, love pulling them every which way.
Sort of “Jules and Jim” — and joints.
If all this sounds like a remake of “Jules and Jim” seen through a haze of a THC cloud, you’d be right.
I suppose you could call it Stone’s version of “Jules and Jim,” plus beheadings, torchings, bombings and strafings.
Their shared gal pal is O (Blake Lively), short for Ophelia, but the feeble Shakespearean allusion matters less than the homage to Pauline Réage's 1954 female-bondage novel, "The Story of O."
Too much voice-over exposition from Blake Lively ’s center-of-attraction character “O” — she was named after Ofelia, not the subject of “The Story of O ” — mars the flow of action.
It’s been a long time since Oliver Stone has made a movie that isn’t directly tied into politics–you can make an argument either way on this one–and his adaptation of Don Winslow’s novel “Savages” has elements that will remind you of those great older movies and even the late Ted Demme’s “Blow,” but also offers something firmly planted in the modern day.
Stone has always been a cinematic preacher, and in Don Winslow’s novel — sort of a “Blow” set in the west coast marijuana trade — he found a great vehicle to sermonize about the violence and greed that have taken over the once-benign Baby Boomer narcotic of choice.
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Director Oliver Stone's most inspired film since "Natural Born Killers" also turns out to be more political than his frustrating "World Trade Center" and "W." combined.
Punctuated by blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments of hallucinatory artistry, it's also Stone at his best, breaking from his self-assumed role as big-screen provocateur ("JFK," "Natural Born Killers") and getting back to telling visceral, unflinching stories ("Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July") that combine two of his favorite topics: illegal drug use and the psychic toll of military service.
With Savages, he is clearly trying to capture a little bit of the old Natural Born Killers vibe.
Savages provides us with a glimpse into the Oliver Stone of yore – the director of lurid, visceral, and menacing crime stories – a facet of the filmmaker we haven’t seen much of since Natural Born Killers and U-Turn.
For Oliver Stone this is a step back to the ultra violence of “Natural Born Killers” and “U Turn,” which is not necessarily a bad thing if he had anything to say about the drug cartels or their unusual way of doing business.
There are two, maybe three, Oliver Stones: the revisionist historian who drives Washington literalists batty with such lurid re-imaginings as “ JFK ” and “ Nixon ,” the straight-ahead mainstream auteur who limns the American experience in such magisterial dramas as “ Born on the Fourth of July ” and “ Platoon ,” and the all-to-the-wall hellion who extrudes that same experience through hallucinatory dreamscapes and lurid violence in genre films such as “ Natural Born Killers .”
The biggest problems with Savages are several narrative dead spots and the introductory sequences (obviously modeled after those in Martin Scorsese's Casino ), which are needlessly convoluted.
They are all savages, and when Mr. Stone runs out of ideas about what to do with them, he borrows every crime-thriller cliché, from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, bathes the bloody decapitations and rapes in the glow of lush cinematography, then distracts the viewer with camera tricks, black-and-white conversions, cell-phone images, classical music and, finally, a maddening finale, narrated by O. Then the movie backs up like a VHS tape on rewind, and there’s an alternate cop-out ending, even more infuriating than the first.
With plot developments that barely make sense, eye-popping visuals that feel as if they were edited together by someone who was coked up, an overqualified cast (John Travolta is also in it) and jittery characterizations, “Savages” feels like Oliver Stone trying to make a Tony Scott (“Domino,” “Man on Fire”) movie.
But it compares well with his breakthrough film — “Salvador” — and shows that, at long last, he feels the need to get back to the altar, even if he hasn’t quite worked out this week’s sermon.
In turning Don Winslow’s 2010 novel Savages into a movie, the writer-director returns him to his favorite early theme — the wages of drugs, in his screenplays for Midnight Express and Scarface — and the Latin American locations and ambiance of Salvador and his documentaries on Fidel Castro (Commandante) and Hugo Chàvez (South of the Border).
Stone relies on his leads to guide us into this hyper-charged inferno, and they fit his juiced-up approach like James Woods and Woody Harrelson did in Stone’s equally hopped-up “Salvador” and “Natural Born Killers.”
He briskly navigates the Elmore Leonard-style twists of the story, and, as he did in films like “Salvador,” “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors,” he transmits his hedonistic pleasure directly to the audience.
Granted, for someone who started so strong, who guided Scarface with his words and Platoon, Salvador, and Nixon with his vision, anything may seem like a letdown.
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The movie marks Oliver Stone's return to the hyperbolic drug thrillers of his early screenwriting career (Midnight Express, Scarface), and the dualistic protagonists—Kitsch, an Iraq War veteran, helps Johnson, a genial hippie, find his inner beast—are heavily reminiscent of Platoon (though the script was adapted from a novel by Don Winslow).
Punctuated by blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments of hallucinatory artistry, it's also Stone at his best, breaking from his self-assumed role as big-screen provocateur ("JFK," "Natural Born Killers") and getting back to telling visceral, unflinching stories ("Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July") that combine two of his favorite topics: illegal drug use and the psychic toll of military service.
Lizard-brained drug business (independent operations as well as "Wal-Mart" cartels) propels the drama, the splitting of the hero between brutal (Taylor Kitsch) and soulful halves (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) harks back to the military schism of Platoon.
There are two, maybe three, Oliver Stones: the revisionist historian who drives Washington literalists batty with such lurid re-imaginings as “ JFK ” and “ Nixon ,” the straight-ahead mainstream auteur who limns the American experience in such magisterial dramas as “ Born on the Fourth of July ” and “ Platoon ,” and the all-to-the-wall hellion who extrudes that same experience through hallucinatory dreamscapes and lurid violence in genre films such as “ Natural Born Killers .”
Savages is Oliver Stone revisiting war a full 27 years after the Oscar winning existential crisis tale of a son torn between conflicting father figures in Platoon.
The movie marks Oliver Stone's return to the hyperbolic drug thrillers of his early screenwriting career (Midnight Express, Scarface), and the dualistic protagonists—Kitsch, an Iraq War veteran, helps Johnson, a genial hippie, find his inner beast—are heavily reminiscent of Platoon (though the script was adapted from a novel by Don Winslow).
In turning Don Winslow’s 2010 novel Savages into a movie, the writer-director returns him to his favorite early theme — the wages of drugs, in his screenplays for Midnight Express and Scarface — and the Latin American locations and ambiance of Salvador and his documentaries on Fidel Castro (Commandante) and Hugo Chàvez (South of the Border).
Before he tapped into the boomer subconscious with his Vietnam trilogy and the Lives of the Presidents series, Stone the screenwriter specialized in such rich, lurid material as Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, and Year of the Dragon.
It's ironic that Stone, whose scripts for Alan Parker 's "Midnight Express" and Brian De Palma 's " Scarface " were a big influence on Quentin Tarantino , should have made a movie that seems like a Tarantino spin-off.