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 ).
The single greatest deviation from the source material is the movie’s ending, which turns away from the “Butch Cassidy” reference point in favor of something closer to “The Sting.”
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 .”
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.
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.
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.
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 .”
At the confluence of altered states and state-sanctioned violence, this drug-fueled thriller is Stone's most successfully provocative picture since "JFK."
While he doesn’t drift into the ADD approach that made movies like JFK and Natural Born Killers so electrifying, he does deliver differing visuals to capture the beach and bloodshed of this particular scene.
While making such movies as "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers," Stone seemed fearless, both in what he put on screen and how he put it there.
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 .”
…t’s been a while since Oliver Stone directed a movie that was actually worth caring about; you’d probably have to go as far back as “Nixon” to find the last instance, although I have a soft spot for “Any Given Sunday.”
As Savages flailed merrily to its erratic, muddled conclusion, I wondered if this was the Oliver Stone mode I really preferred — or whether we wouldn’t be better off with, say, the likes of the equally bombastic but more tightly crafted Nixon or Wall Street.
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.
And when he's not busy rewriting history (Nixon, W., JFK) or examining war (Platoon) or football (Any Given Sunday) or finance (Wall Street) or 9/11 (World Trade Center), the prolific filmmaker screeches his car wheels back onto B-movie turf: drugs, sex, and guns.
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.
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 .”
He returns to bloody fine form with “Savages,” a sexy, vicious and altogether riveting thriller that’s the “Born on the Fourth of July” director’s best movie in years.
His latest project, an adaptation of a Don Winslow novel, is far removed from the politically charged arena of JFK, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.
Watch any of these films and the only thing they will lead a viewer to wonder is what happened to the radicalized, trailblazing filmmaker responsible for modern classics such as 1986's "Platoon," 1989's "Born on the Fourth of July," 1991's "JFK," and 1994's "Natural Born Killers."
"Born on the Fourth of July," "The Doors," "JFK," "Natural Born Killers," "Nixon," "Any Given Sunday"--these were bold, controversial and visionary works produced at a time when such things were generally considered to be the exception to the Hollywood and no matter what you may have thought about the films themselves, it cannot be denied that when you came out of them, you knew that you had just seen a Movie in all its risky glory and not just another inflated television episode of the kind that had begun clogging the multiplexes in greater and greater numbers.
After the hectoring tedium of his 2010 “Wall Street” sequel, it’s a relief to discover that the pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall, drugged-up and lunatic Oliver Stone of “U Turn” and “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors” is not gone forever.
At its wayward best, Savages summons the craftily addled mania of prime Stone product like Platoon, Natural Born Killers and U Turn: movies about people driven to the edge of madness, in film vehicles that go over the edge with them.
While Oliver Stone has yet to direct a memorable feature in this 21st century — World Trade Center, W. and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps are raging mediocrities, while Alexander and Savages are downright awful — there existed a decade-long stretch when he was one of this nation's most interesting and uncompromising filmmakers, crafting such controversial conversation starters as JFK and Natural Born Killers (and, of course, finding more universal acceptance with his Oscar-winning Platoon).
But despite his typical tricks, and tics — hyperfast editing, mixed-up film stocks — this is more reminiscent of pulpy career low points such as “U Turn.”
This is the Stone of Natural Born Killers and U Turn and Any Given Sunday, a director whose flair for absurdist excess and merciless satire can turn off viewers of milder sensibilities.
With its drained-out greasy colour scheme, and arsenal of visual tricks, sexual kink and Itchy and Scratchy cartoon violence, his new film is intended to signal the 65-year-old director’s return to the amoral trippy filmmaking of Natural Born Killers and U Turn, rather than the journeyman professional who gave us World Trade Center and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
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.
Because, at least formally, Savages kind of is that return: the first Oliver Stone narrative feature since the 1990s that looks pretty much like an Oliver Stone film: the energy that was completely absent from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps , W. , and World Trade Center is back, and it's cinematically functional in ways Alexander never even thought about.
Adapting Don Winslow's novel, director/co-writer Oliver Stone ("Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," "World Trade Center") ignores that "Savages" hardly represents the first movie about the drug trade, presenting the business and the risks involved as if no one understands that big money brings big power and, often, big guns.
Savages, a lurid thriller about the cross-border drug trade, is Oliver Stone’s latest entry in his “Current Events” phase, following his ode to 9/11 heroism World Trade Center (2006), his Dubya-years semi-satire W. (2008), and his corporate-shark sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010).
But after treading water with "World Trade Center," "W." and "Wall Street 2," Stone has caught a mighty wave with "Savages."
When he's working with material to match his grand vision—JFK, Talk Radio, Nixon—he can produce hallucinatory film experiences.
After the hectoring tedium of his 2010 “Wall Street” sequel, it’s a relief to discover that the pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall, drugged-up and lunatic Oliver Stone of “U Turn” and “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors” is not gone forever.
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.
From his early directorial outing, 1981's The Hand (Michael Caine loses his appendage, but it comes back, ferociously!), to his 1991 hallucinogenic rock bio The Doors, to his hyperactive homicidal-twosome movie, 1994's Natural Born Killers, Stone has a tendency to inflate what is essentially genre fare with grandiosity, with portentous gab.
"Born on the Fourth of July," "The Doors," "JFK," "Natural Born Killers," "Nixon," "Any Given Sunday"--these were bold, controversial and visionary works produced at a time when such things were generally considered to be the exception to the Hollywood and no matter what you may have thought about the films themselves, it cannot be denied that when you came out of them, you knew that you had just seen a Movie in all its risky glory and not just another inflated television episode of the kind that had begun clogging the multiplexes in greater and greater numbers.
Coming as it did after a string of slightly tonier projects—the series of 'State of the Union" pictures that began with World Trade Center (2006), continued through W. (2008), and ended, two years later, with that ill-advised Wall Street sequel—Savages promised (or threatened, perhaps) a return to another, more disreputable Oliver Stone: the sleazoid pulp merchant who gave us U Turn and, above all, Natural Born Killers.
As Savages flailed merrily to its erratic, muddled conclusion, I wondered if this was the Oliver Stone mode I really preferred — or whether we wouldn’t be better off with, say, the likes of the equally bombastic but more tightly crafted Nixon or Wall Street.
After the hectoring tedium of his 2010 “Wall Street” sequel, it’s a relief to discover that the pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall, drugged-up and lunatic Oliver Stone of “U Turn” and “Natural Born Killers” and “The Doors” is not gone forever.
Following on the heels of his Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps , Stone directs Savages – an adaptation of Don Winslow’s novel of the same name about a pair of Southern California Marijuana growers who end up on the wrong (i.e.
The firebrand director and social commentator who ripped our entire culture a new one in Wall Street and Platoon?
And after recent, more self-consciously “serious” filmmaking — “ World Trade Center ,” “ W. ,” the “ Wall Street ” sequel and a couple of leftish documentaries — it’s nice to see Stone attempting a fierce, frenetic thriller.
…t’s been a while since Oliver Stone directed a movie that was actually worth caring about; you’d probably have to go as far back as “Nixon” to find the last instance, although I have a soft spot for “Any Given Sunday.”
Now here’s Oliver Stone as we haven’t really seen him since Any Given Sunday in 1999: hyperactive, hyperviolent, and utterly convinced that the amped-up debauchery of his heroes and villains is transcendence itself.
In that respect, it’s his most purely enjoyable, no-ax-to-grind movie since “Any Given Sunday.”
I enjoyed “Any Given Sunday,” for instance, but its unexplained use of clips from the chariot race in “Ben-Hur” seemed like something somebody thought up at 4 a.m. after ingesting enough substances to stun a camel.
This is the Stone of Natural Born Killers and U Turn and Any Given Sunday, a director whose flair for absurdist excess and merciless satire can turn off viewers of milder sensibilities.
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.
For filmgoers who can remember as far back as 2005, “Savages” could be described as the movie “ Domino ” tried so frenetically to be.
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.
If the film had reached a sort of "True Romance" fevered pitch with a good dose of dark humor and a collection of oddball, dirtball characters to breathe life into its main crime caper, Stone might have had something here.
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.
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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).
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).
It is so much an Oliver Stone film, in fact, that it plays sort of like the marijuana-themed version of his screenplay for the 1983 Scarface .
It's also smarter than "Scarface," which Stone wrote during his manic phase in the '80s.
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.
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.
This leads to Travoltas other fine moment, when Ben asks how his wife is doing and Travolta says simply, Shes dying, and were reminded of the vulnerable actor who moved us in Blow Out and Saturday Night Fever.
In a way, Lado is a comic variation on Javier Bardem’s killer in “No Country for Old Men,’’ and the best way to follow the story’s switchbacks and double-crosses is to keep your eye on the fox.
Travolta makes a wonderfully selfish schlub, and Del Toro is as memorably malevolent as Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men," without a gimmicky wig.
Del Toro as Lado, in particular, is just as terrific, memorable and scene-stealing as Javier Bardem was as in No Country for Old Men.
Literally twirling his mustache, he makes Javier Bardem from "No Country for Old Men" look like the teddy bear from "Ted".