Savages Review
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What we liked:
Good action with lots of thrills.What we disliked:
The movie lacks originality.Oliver Stone gets down and dirty with plenty of violence and action as Savages hits the big screen.
The principal family in Savages is a surrogate one, a ménage à trois consisting of innovative marijuana growers Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their rich girlfriend, O (Blake Lively), short for Ophelia. (She narrates.) Ben insists he can run his business with minimal violence, using some of the profits to do good works in Africa, trusting to Chon — a knotted-up Iraq war vet — to employ force on the rare occasions it’s called for. It’s a remarkably gentle arrangement. O loves both men, opposites whose spirits can be said (if you’ll forgive the woo-woo) to commingle inside her. But business intrudes — a video via the Internet from the Baja cartel starring a man in a skull mask and seven severed heads: “These guys were stupid. Be smarter.” The Mexican cartel wants a piece of the business in return for wider distribution of the dope. The local DEA agent, Dennis (John Travolta) — who takes money from all sides — tells the boys, “Don’t f— with Wal-Mart. Embrace the change.”
Fatted, his hair thinning, Travolta gives his first truly middle-aged performance and his best in years. His Dennis is amoral but not inhuman. He has kids to feed and a wife dying of cancer. Everyone has a family to support, even the scariest assassin, Lado (Benicio Del Toro), who doles out grisly punishments with chilling precision. Del Toro’s face is all dark hollows, as if his coal-black eyes had scorched his own visage in the mirror. His boss, Elena (Salma Hayek), took over the cartel after the deaths of her husband and sons. If this were a Quentin Tarantino movie, the character would be camp, a mythic revenger, but Hayek gets the balance between public shows of power and private woe just right. Of her precious daughter, the only family left, she says, “She’s ashamed of me and I’m proud of her for it.”
Savages is based on a book by Don Winslow that reads like notes for the screenplay he co-wrote with Shane Salerno* and Stone. (There’s a thank-you to Stone in the acknowledgements.) The plotting loosens in the second half, but that’s part of the film’s integrity: The emotional crosscurrents force the melodrama off the usual tracks. Kidnapped by Elena, the impatient, entitled O doesn’t stand on ceremony. She gets close to her captor, to the point where Elena almost — almost — treats her like a daughter.
But if the characters recognize their common humanity, it doesn’t stop them from killing. As Ben the idealist does ghastly things to save O and the carnage ramps up, you feel an infernal machine at work. It’s business.
David Edelstein of New York Magazine
The film is impressive.
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