Savages (2012)

Savages is a film by the excellent director Oliver Stone, director of great movies like Platoon and JFK. The film has a few notable actors, like Benicio Del Toro and John Travolta, and some smaller, yet still notable actors like Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The plot revolves around a shared relationship, and things leading to another resulting in a kidnapped love interest and the two lead men having to rescue her. Simple, yet effective structure. All of these things going for the movie lead me to wonder where did it go so wrong?To clear one thing up, I don't think this movie is bad. There are some things that the movie does well. The camerawork is overall fairly impressive. There were no shots that left me blown away, but there were no real shots that left me burying my head in my hands. Benicio Del Toro was fantastic in his role as a psychotic cartel member. The action scenes were well shot. And that's all that really stands out as being particularly well done. There are other things that work in the movies favor, but not enough to be worth pointing out.The big problem that I have with this movie is that it feels like a cycle of sex, drugs, and violence, with very little substance in between. The movie came across as boring when it wasn't directly involving one of those three topics. Even the interactions with the main protagonists and antagonists stood out as incredibly boring. There was never any moment where I felt that I really ever truly cared for the protagonists' struggle, so I found it incredibly hard to take these discussions seriously. The stakes never felt all that high, as the tense moments were rushed through and the mundane filler moments were too long and had no real impact on the overarching plot.The acting from the main characters was terrible for the most part. The only protagonist that stood out as good was Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who was still not at the top of his game for the movie. The villains didn't fare much better either. Pretty much the only character of note was Del Toro, who was easily the best part of the movie, but wasn't given anything other than playing some irredeemable psychopath. His character tried but failed to have layers.My biggest complaint with the whole movie falls in the post production. So many of the editing choices were just awful. The color palette of the movie was terrible. It wasn't ugly in the same sense as the excellent Enemy, which uses the yellow color palette to create a constant sense of uneasiness, but in the same sense as Annihilation. Even saying that is doing Annihilation a huge disservice. That movie at least had its moments of being drop dead gorgeous. This movie never had one of those. There were times where it had a scene that tried to be emotional, but the color palette took pretty much all feeling away. The ending is a prime example. When the main characters are all lying on the ground dying, every time they injected poison, it added a new shade of yellow, which was distracting and just made the whole thing feel more like it was meant to be a cheesy action scene. The same thing happened earlier in the movie, when the guy who was watching over O was shot, it took what could be an even slightly emotional scene and turned it into a rushed mess that left me holding my face in my hands. The best thing that I can use to describe the editing is that it felt like a trailer.Overall, this movie is a mess. It does nothing remarkably well, but also does nothing so egregiously bad that it left me offended. It is a fairly good movie to watch if you are looking for a dumb action movie to watch with friends, but it is nothing more than that. It's not a particularly smart film, nor is it a particularly stunning film. It's just a film.

This was a cracking film. The cast is just fantastic; there are plenty of younger stars, but the big three, Hayek, Travolta and Del Toro are electric, even though the story isn't exactly centred around them, when they appear it's first rate, Saturday night entertainment - action, guns, violence and good old American, 1980s, Christian morals thrown in for good measures. The title is god awful, even given the theme of the film (no spoilers here), it doesn't make any sense to me that they'd call the film Savages - Beautiful Savages maybe. Any way, apart from that minor criticism there is nothing about the actual film that is half-baked or ill conceived - it rocks from start to finish and sees Oliver Stone return to true form, who has had some belters, but he's had some utter doozers too, Savages comes under the former.

Twenty years ago an Oliver Stone film would be an event but the director has become wayward of late.This marks a return to form but it revisits his screenplay of Scarface too much in places aided with his kinetic camera work and filming style used in Natural Born Killers but here it hinders the flow.Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is peace loving hippy Buddhist and his best buddy Chon (Taylor Kitsch) a former soldier have developed the best type of marijuana which have made them successful in southern California.Both also share the same woman Ophelia (Blake Lively) and life is going swimmingly until the Mexican Baja Cartel demands that they join forces with them and later kidnap Ophelia.The cartel is ruthlessly led by Elena (Salma Hayek) her brutal enforcer Lado (Benicio Del Toro) wants Elena but also realises he needs to make his own moves.Ben and Chon realise they need to take on the cartel and free Ophelia and they can only do this with the help of the slippery and crooked DEA agent (John Travolta) a man who has worked out all the angles.The film is hampered by the constant narration by Lively as well as her performance which is less than lively. She certainly looks like someone who enchant two best friends but she can never mesmerise the audience.Kitsch's character is one dimensional, just a gung ho grunt which leaves Johnson to make up for the shortcomings of the two main leads. At least his character is more subtle learning the hard way that being involved in the drugs trade does not go hand in hand with being a peace loving beatnik. He has to toughen up and gets his hands bloody.The film works mainly because of the supporting actors. Hayek, Travolta (with his natural balding hairline) Bichir and Del Toro make the most of their thin characterisations, people who are rooted to their families despite being savages.Stone makes up for the rest with his filming style with an operatic approach to violence but why were we presented with an alternate version of the climax?

"Savages" has very little that is profound to say about both drugs and the narcotics trade, save that they can land you in a lot of trouble and that its universes are inhabited by some very dangerous people. The film is fast, loose and kinetic; its runtime clocks in at over two hours, despite not feeling like it. It is extraordinarily visceral and wallows in postmodernism to the extent that cathartic events towards the end are quite literally rewound by the narrator so as to depict them in a different way. It is also somewhat of a generic film – at one point, a character utters a ridiculously clichéd line along the lines of "smoke that....", before dropping an f-bomb and making an impossible shot with a scoped rifle unrealistic to the circumstances.Quite, this is not for the crowd that enjoyed "Traffic" – its multi-stranded nature; insistence on dipping in and out of a varied glut of characters' fates and very airy, almost dreamlike aesthetic, as the camera waves in and out of compositions and has fun with focus and depth of field to put across a sense of feeling to the audience, is about all it has in common with said film."Savages" is told from the perspective of Blake Lively's Ofelia, whose name is abridged to merely "O" and who spends most of the time away from the very people whose actions she is telling us about and the places within which these things happen. She lives in Laguna Beach, California, with Chon (Kitsch) and Ben (Taylor-Johnson) – two young-ish men who are to the local marijuana trade what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were to computers and microchips. We are told Shaun fought in the Middle East, and buries his scars with weed and blunt sexual intercourse with O, but this is not revisited. Both he and his dreadlocked accomplice, we sense, are too young to be competent enough to be running the operation (which extends as far as Africa and South East Asia) they do. They unrealistically possess access to a "Bourne"-like command centre; maintain an uneasy relationship with John Travolta's DEA agent and have an endless supply of cannabis.O's background sees her, like so many people who get into marijuana, come from a family made broken by the lack of a father figure – something which saw her tumble out into the Californian counter culture and into a universe of hedonism and self-gratification. The abruptness of her name derives from a hatred of high-culture; reading and intellect, something synonymous with her type, in that it derives from a William Shakespeare text, and that cannot be tolerated... At one point, Shaun perfectly sums up the three's philosophy when he reminds Ben: "You were dead the second you were born." "Welcome to paradise" O tells us as things open, but we then witness the threesome proceed to dull their brains and numb their senses through smoking in order to pass the time - in spite of living under the roaring sun; on a fabulous beach and with more than enough recreation in the form of cycling; surfing and otherwise to fill their hours. We have all frequented places that offer these things, at least once in our lifetimes, either in the capacity of holiday makers or otherwise – at no point, as we occupied these places of such beauty, did it occur to us that stupefying our minds with illicit substances might be rather a good idea.The trio are so good at what they do, although we are unsure as to O's actual purpose, that they attract the attention of a bigger, broader Mexican cartel based just south of the border going through its own fiscal problems. Offering to move in and thus soak up some of the action, the gang, run by Selma Hayek, are aghast when Ben and Shaun say "no" – something which kicks off the kidnapping of O and forces the two supporting males into a spiral of blood; guts; guns and grief. But much of this has the film sound as if it is better than it is.For what it is, "Savages" is bouncy and energetic, and it involves us enough to want to observe as to where things venture. Oliver Stone, a versatile and often very impressive director, has essentially made the Mexico-United States border narcotics thriller for this generation: the Skype calls; the keyboard warfare and the sub-Call of Duty sniper fights. The characters are young and hip – the expert on the hacking and computer data side of things even looks as if he fell out of an episode of "The O.C." When the time comes to see two stalwarts such as Travolta and del Toro share the screen, in what is a fairly intense dialogue-driven sequence, it feels as if Stone is pausing in order to provide those who can remember a little further back with a moment for themselves.And so we come away from the film unable to either love or hate it – it would not be a misstep to recommend it, but to place it against some of Stone's other work and other films on the subject matter would be a mistake. Where "Savages" ends up, that is to say what propels its final act in the form of a counter-kidnap, might very well have occurred at the hour mark is the best exemplar of its structural problems. Films big in both scope and scale of the contemporary crime thriller sort, as two sides appear to constantly rub one another the wrong way, often have the potential to be truly memorable: "Heat" and "The Usual Suspects" taught us that. "Savages" is not one of these instances, but that is not to say it is of no worth.