As Savages begins, Blake Lively informs us just because she’s telling us this story it doesn’t mean she’s alive. Considering we don’t know her character in the slightest the dramatic effect of that statement is nil. She then introduces us to her two drug-dealing boyfriends with whom she shares a living space and her body.
First there’s Chon (Taylor Kitsch), a former Navy SEAL back from Afghanistan with PTSD and plenty of marijuana seeds. Then there’s Ben, the opposite of Chon in that he’s a peaceful drug dealer who uses a lot of the money they make to help children in Africa. The difference between the two is rather obvious, but Lively, playing Ophelia (or O as she likes to be called) — a name I’m sure doesn’t need any further explanation — proceeds to discuss their differences as she talks, and talks, and talks over the first 15 minutes or so, and continuously throughout. But it’s her opening introduction that nearly took me out of the entire film.
When I say the two “share” Ophelia I mean just that and in a moment very early on we see her and Chon having rough sex over which she says, “I have orgasms, he has wargasms.” I’ve been told this is a line directly out of Don Winslow’s book from which the film is adapted, but I have to assume it didn’t make the reader roar with laughter as it did with me and my screening audience. We later learn she takes comfort in the fact Chon “fucks” her while Ben “makes love” and with the acceptance of these differences a happy, drug-loving family is born, but it’s not going to be all roses for long.
Due to circumstances I won’t get into here, the success of Chon and Ben’s business has gained the attention of a Mexican drug cartel led by Salma Hayek, whose introduction involves a phone call to her daughter living stateside, as if this isn’t an obvious bit of foreshadowing to a story we’ve heard a countless number of times. The hope, I guess, is that you haven’t seen it in this way, which is to say through the lens of Oliver Stone. What does this mean? Well, it means plenty of psychedelic imagery, black-and-white fading to color for no reason, awful dialogue and a lot of grisly bloodshed.
So Salma wants in on the Chon and Ben business. Her minions, led by Lado (Benicio del Toro) and Alex (Demian Bichir), set up a meeting with the two boys where a deal is offered and expected to be accepted. It isn’t and all hell breaks loose. Deciding to flee the country to avoid trouble with the cartel, O is kidnapped before the trio can get out and the story plays out from there. Threats are made, people are burned, eyes will dangle from their sockets, IEDs will explode, rocket launchers will be shot and Blake Lively will narrate the whole damned thing.
The only time I found myself getting at all interested was when Ben and Chon team with Emile Hirsch playing a super hacker. Using information obtained from a crooked DEA agent (John Travolta), they set up an elaborate scheme to steal millions from Hayek’s bunch as part of a 15 minute stretch of the film that makes it seem as if we’re finally getting somewhere. We weren’t as the story eventually falls back into the tired back-and-forth between a bunch of characters that aren’t worth cheering for one way or another.
For me, my interest walking into the film primarily resided in Hayek’s character. I wanted to see Hayek as a bad-ass cartel leader and I loved the fact the role was given to a woman. I guess, if you tried, you could argue she is some kind of a bad-ass, but she’s presented in such a way it feels more based in reality than it really should be with strokes of melodrama that damage any authenticity they may be going for. Instead of having fun with the material, the film turns into rather heavy-handed feature filled with hackneyed one-note characters that tear it down.
Hayek is a cartel leader that loves the daughter that doesn’t love her. Del Toro loves to torture and kill people so he does. Kitsch is a bad ass that doesn’t have a problem killing anyone. Johnson just wants to sell drugs and help people. Lively just wants to have sex and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. The only character that comes close to having any kind of story arc is Johnson, but you care so little about all of the characters it never matters. It’s all so boring as their motivations don’t seem to be determined by the situation, but purely by a script telling them what to do.
Then you get to the end, which I’m sure most people will be talking about, of which I was already so disinterested in the film I couldn’t have really cared less. However, had I been invested in what was going on I probably would have been a bit more upset. As it was, I just saw it as one more tedious bit of storytelling in a film trying to be different visually but forgot to be interesting narratively.
Oliver Stone is no longer the same filmmaker that made Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July or JFK. You can see him trying to tap into being the man that made Natural Born Killers, or trying to make up for only writing Scarface and not directing it. It would seem he just can’t be that person. His films are starting to feel like they were made by a man that just learned all the editing tricks in Final Cut Pro and the film suffers for it.
Savages is less than average all around. The characters are paper thin, the plot is tired and the execution is amateur at best. And my god, someone, please put out a required mandate that says voice over narration must go, along with the phrase that opens with “They say…” I don’t care what “they say” because guess what, it’s not as profound as you think your trumped up phrase actually is.
