"SAVAGES"
Based upon the novel by Don Winslow
Screenplay Written by Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone
Directed by Oliver Stone
* 1/2 (one and a half stars)
While it just pains me to think about it, let alone say it aloud in writing to all of you, I just may have to face the very possible reality that Oliver Stone, one of my favorite cinematic heroes, may have reached his creative end.
Viewing the steep creative descent of Oliver Stone in recent years is perhaps it is akin to watching a once great athlete sliding downwards in decline, I would imagine. Between the years of 1986-1999, the oeuvre and creative spirit of Oliver Stone was a supreme force of nature. While Stone has been criticized over and again for a lack of subtlety, I found myself supremely propelled by his social/political outrage and his virtuosic filmmaking which almost seemed to re-invent the cinematic wheel with every new project he took on and educating and exhilarating me in the process. Just take a moment and think about films like "Platoon" (1986), "Wall Street" (1987), "Talk Radio" (1988), "Born On The Fourth Of July" (1989), "The Doors" (1991), "Natural Born Killers" (1994), "Any Given Sunday" (1999) and the extraordinary "JFK" (1991), which I still feel is not only one of the very best films of the 1990s but a hallucinogenic, political powder keg that means more to me now than it ever had before.
In recent years, however, Stone's drive has diminished considerably. "World Trade Center" (2006), was respectful to a fault. It's trailer contained more wrenching emotion than the actual film. "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" (2010), was a film that never found a sense of the moral outrage it kept hinting at. And while I did love "W." (2008), Stone's more nuanced and gently satirical examination of George W. Bush, I was surprised that he did not utilize more of his trademark fire and brimstone approach. I suppose that I have been harboring a feeling which I have been valiantly, and maybe protectively, trying to hold in vain as I kept telling myself, "Maybe the next one will be better." With the arrival of "Savages," Oliver Stone's helter-skelter drug running thriller, at first it felt as if Stone had gotten his creative mojo back as the film is unapologetically lurid and contains some downright nasty filmmaking and storytelling that allows Stone to create the types of cinematic razzle dazzle that used to be his trademark. Also, I hoped that maybe even without a political framework or agenda, Stone would be in the position to just flex his muscles and let his creativity run as wild as the story necessitates. Those high hopes were dashed within the first 30 minutes of "Savages," as the film skidded into idle and would slowly yet spectacularly careen off of the road into mindless insignificance. This is a terrible film. The worst I have seen from Oliver Stone. I often joke after seeing a bad movie that I see these things just so you won't have to. Trust me, dear readers, "Savages," although not for lack of effort, is nowhere near worth your time and hard earned dollar.
Set in and around the beaches of Southern California, "Savages" stars Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson as Chon, an Iraq/Afghanistan war veteran and Ben, a Buddhist, respectively. The twosome are best friends as well as lavishly wealthy drug dealers and marijuana growers who have essentially created the perfect potent product due to the seeds Chon has smuggled out of Afghanistan. The partnership of Chon and Ben makes for the obligatory mixture of brawn and brains as Chon is the ruthless enforcer while the level headed and kind-hearted Ben takes his riches and performs more philanthropic acts around the globe. The two are legally protected through the covert actions of corrupt DEA Agent Dennis (John Travolta) and they also share the love and sex of a blond beach babe paramour named Ophelila Sage, otherwise known simply as "O" (Blake Lively), who vacuously narrates the film.
Chon and Ben's exquisite product eventually draws the unwanted attention of a Mexican drug cartel led by the vicious Elena Sanchez (Salma Hayek) and enforced by the brutally malicious and sadistic Lado (Benicio del Toro). Elena's organization approaches Chon and Ben with a business proposal to form a partnership with the cartel. At first, Chon and Ben graciously refuse, but knowing full well of Elena and Lado's tactic for beheading adversaries, the two reluctantly agree to the deal but secretly plan to self-destruct their own organization and flee California for one year. Unfortunately, O is kidnapped by the cartel, and held for ransom as Elena warns the boys that O will be killed unless they partner with her organization. And now, it is up to Chon and Ben to take on the cartel by themselves to rescue O from certain death.
As it stands, the basic plot line of "Savages" feels ripe and ready for a crazy, bloody slab of pulp fiction and to potentially be delivered in Oliver Stone's orgiastic, over the top style, on paper felt like it could be a perfectly sordid matching. Shockingly, for a film that gleefully wallows in endlessly profane dialogue, nudity, menage-a-trois sequences, copious drug usage, gory shootouts, one instance of rape and propulsive amounts of naughtiness, evil and badness, it was just amazing to me how within that entire maelstrom, it feels as if nothing happens. Look, it's not for lack of effort as Stone certainly pulls out all of the stops during this rancorous joyride. All of the actors are game for the proceedings and do what they can with the material (Hayek and Travolta seemed to be having the most fun to me). Also, my reaction is not necessarily due to my sensibilities being offended as it does indeed take quite a bit to actually offend me. I knew what kind of a film this would be heading into it and it would indeed be my own fault if I had the nerve to be surprised by any of the brutality on display. What bothered me so tremendously about "Savages" is that for all of the sound and fury, everything felt to be painfully gratuitous, as it Stone felt that having blood, nudity and foul language would be enough. "Savages" is yet another motion picture that has all of the right notes but cannot play the music whatsoever. And someone with the pedigree of Oliver Stone should know better as he has performed much better in the past.
Every element that makes "Savages" stand out as a HARD R RATED film just hangs in the air, connected to absolutely nothing that would give the madness any meaning, significance or gravity to make the audience feel propelled along by the experience as a whole. With "Natural Born Killers," Stone operated in a wildly overwrought Kubrickian style as he explored our relationship with extreme violence, especially through the media, as he traced the nationwide killing spree of Mickey and Mallory Know (a blistering Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis). That particular context, our simultaneous fascination and disgust with violence, gave that film a devastating context that the audience could not disassociate itself from. Even with "U-Turn" (1997), Stone's flawed but wild exercise in violent genre filmmaking, he was aided supremely by his excellent cast (which included Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, and Jennifer Lopez among others) and a level of filmmaking that made it feel as if you were looking at a twisted view of America through the cracked, opposite end of a kaleidoscope. With "Savages," while I could feel Stone trying to reach a bit for that past brass cinematic ring, everything about the actual story felt to be so pathetically under thought, so pitifully under-examined, that I did not care about any character or anything that happened in the film. Just being submerged in genre filth is not enough without some of those heavy duty characters to make the whole enterprise scream.
It feels as if the long shadow of Quentin Tarantino strikes again, an ironic thought as "Natural Born Killers" originated as a Tarantino screenplay which Stone radically re-worked to fit his own aesthetics. But without a political agenda for "Savages," Stone seemed to be more than lost and here is where Tarantino just eclipses him. Quentin Tarantino is a ferociously gifted storyteller who has, time and again, created his characters and full cinematic universal so supremely, completely and thoroughly, that if any element were absent, the entire film would crumble. However, with "Savages," none of the characters really exist beyond superficiality. In fact, Chon and Ben would be completely interchangeable if it were not for the overly facile reason that Chon is a hot head and Ben is level headed. "Savages" possesses a tremendous lack of depth and soul and yet, there are seeds for areas where "Savages" could have extended itself. Frankly, I am surprised that Stone did not even bother to try and go deeper. For instance, one very easy approach would be one Stone has tackled before, taking his lamb of a hero or anti-hero (in this case, Ben), transforming him into a wolf and exploring the consequences of such a transformation. Or, he could have gone the "Natural Born Killers" route and placed us firmly inside the unsympathetic brain of Chon. Yes, both of those are "been there, done that" ideas but at least it would have been something!
Or even better, perhaps the very best thing he could have done for this film was to give O a purpose other than to look pretty, be a willing sexual dynamo and unwilling captive. For Pete's sakes, O narrates the entire film and this would have been a great chance to give Blake Lively a starring role that could skyrocket her growing film career. Unfortunately for her, there's not much for her to do but to again look pretty and/or distressed. Yet, there could have been a strong relationship between O and her captor, Elena that is really just hinted at. O has a non-existent relationship with her Mother, while Elena has an increasingly contentious and fractured relationship with her daughter. Once O and Elena meet, I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, "Savages" would begin to reveal itself through a potential powerhouse storyline of a bizarre "Mother/daughter" relationship that would then allow Lively to just chomp her teeth into this character and film. But, sadly, it was not to be.
For Stone's detractors who have proclaimed that he has been lousy with his conceptions of his rare female characters, "Savages" will definitely give them more ammunition. This is most evident with the film's just empty headed narration from O that I would gather was conceived as a satirical jab against the bubble headed dope fueled beach babes of California but soon revealed itself to be just an exercise in unjustifiably bad writing. In an early scene when Chon and O are introduced to us, they are in the deep throes of erotic passion and O states to us, "Where I have orgasms, Chon has 'wargasms'". Yup, "Savages" is that kind of movie.
While for much of "Savages," I felt the proceedings dangerously remained in neutral but the further it careened along, the worse it became because the entire escapade proved to be entirely pointless. The film's worst error occurred during the film's gory, climactic shootout, a sequence which then upends itself into some sort of cinematic do-over that it ultimately negated a fair amount of what we had seen thus far. It was like those DVD releases that promote the bonus features of alternate endings, something that always tells me that the filmmakers had no idea of how to end their movie. But for "Savages," it wasn't just Stone having no idea of how to end this movie and shooting several endings. It was as if instead of picking one conclusion, he decided to throw all of them into the film, rendering everything meaningless and just making a bad film much worse by remaining on screen even longer.
What has happened to Oliver Stone? It's not like he has forgotten how to make a movie. It seems as if he is stumbling on why he is making movies. Maybe during his creative peak, during which he was especially prolific, he used up his gifts. Maybe, his passion for cinematic storytelling has subsides. Certainly, those two options are valid and even reasonable. Not every creative endeavor can strike gold. but this is Oliver Stone and while I am not quite ready to give up on him, I fear that time is rapidly approaching.
Especially, if he releases more films as unrelenting awful as "Savages."
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