REVIEW OF SAVAGES

Savages is a 2012 American action thriller film directed
by Oliver Stone. It is based on
the novel of the same name by Don Winslow. The screenplay
was written by Stone, Winslow, and Shane Salerno. The film was
released on July 6, 2012, and features an ensemble cast including Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, Benicio del Toro and John Travolta[2].

Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a University of California, Berkeley graduate, and
Chon (Taylor Kitsch), a former U.S. Navy SEALare top weed growers, their product is the best in
the business. Ben provides the brain and Chon the brawn as they run their
operation successfully and relatively peacefully. They also share a girlfriend
Ophelia (Blake Lively) and this threeway
relationship works well. One day they are approached by representatives of
Elena Sánchez (Salma Hayek) of the Baja
Cartel. She wants to go into business with them. Ben and Chon do not want to be
involved with a cartel so Elena sends her henchman Lado, (Benicio del Toro) to kidnap Ophelia. Following the kidnap, the duo
work with a corrupt DEA agent, played by John Travolta to fight back
against the cartel and rescue Ophelia.

What Is Good About The Movie:

Savages is
Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky,
amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social,
topical, or political relevance. How liberated from an agenda is this movie? You
can feel how alive Stone is to the material. He stamps every scene with his
darkly combustible cinematic personality. Based on a novel by Don Winslow, Savages is
grandiose underworld pulp staged with screw-tightening skill and a taste for
nasty kicks that spills over into sadism and dread.

The film is
narrated, in a Sunset Boulevard-meets-Kill Bill way, by
Ophelia (Blake Lively), known as O, a free-spirited California blonde who lives
with, and loves, two guys and is their anything-goes siren-goddess. Chon (Taylor
Kitsch), a scarred, sexy hunk of an Afghanistan war vet, is the tougher and
more volatile of the men. Stone presents some bravura set pieces, from a
pulse-quickening encounter with a highway cop to an incendiary multivehicle
heist to every scene with Benicio Del Toro as a very scary sociopath. As for
Taylor Kitsch, he wipes away any lingering John Carter cobwebs with his
explosive performance, and John Travolta is funny and desperate as a DEA agent
up to his ears in slime.

The three best characters in Savages are Benicio
Del Toro’s slimy cartel enforcer, Salma Hayek’s mob boss, and a sleazy DEA agent
played by John Travolta, and they’re the bad guys.

With a thick, bushy mustache and sporting an Elvis-styled
pompadour, del Toro gives one of the most fascinatingly scuzzy performances of
his career; Oliver Stone finally puts Travolta’s goofball tendencies to good
use by casting him in what amounts to the comic relief role of the movie as a
strained, high-pitched bad cop; and Salma Hayek proves that she was always more
than a fantastic body by chewing the scenery as a terribly insecure mob boss.
The rest of the cast acquit themselves nicely – there isn’t a bad performance
in the movie – but Hayek, Del Toro, and Travolta get the most wildly
entertaining characters, and I wish there was more of them.

What Is Bad About The Movie:

Unfortunately, Savages mostly focuses on its three
exciting-as-flat-soda main characters as they attempt to reunite and continue
their happily hedonistic lifestyle. 

Overall Grade:

A-