Stuck in a slump of late, the irrepressible Oliver Stone comes out guns-a-blazing in Savages. Based on a Don Winslow novel, the film conjures up the finger-in-your-eye, 80s version of Stone now pushed even further cutting edge with an up-to-date sensibility. Especially the violence, which while extreme, somehow never seems gratuitous. And especially the humor, which feeds nicely off the opposite natures of our two heroes.
One guy is an ex-Navy Seal and Iraq war veteran with a cold mien and nerves of steel, Chon (Taylor Kitsch, John Carter/Friday Night Lights.) The other, a dredlocked botanist who grows marijuana with a 33% THC content and moonlights doing charity work in Africa, Ben (Aaron Johnson, Kick-Ass, Nowhere Boy). Together they share a successful drug enterprise in Laguna Beach, and a girl, Ophelia (Blake Lively), who calls them “the Buddhist and the baddest.” An open menage a trois cements a bond between the three, who suddenly find themselves the target of a hostile takeover by a Mexican drug cartel, led by a classy Salma Hayek, and fronted by the cynical and loco Benicio del Toro, in a career performance.
Stone’s achievement breaks down into multiple successes. He manages to bring out front his arrested-adolescent penchant for rubbing his audience’s face in the most giddy and deranged circumstances. Then we laugh together at what would be prurient if it weren’t also so damn plausible. The situation surrounding Mexican drug cartels, no laughing matter, is so nuts that what might seem like a mock-hyper violence is only a put-on until the 10,000 deaths per year tally hits home (also see the excellent Mexican film, Miss Bala, from earlier this year.) Then we laugh not because it’s easier than crying, but because even a villain as completely batshit crazy as Del Toro comes off as ultimately a realistic character rather than a caricature. And what better contrast than to have a pansy-assed but totally lovable Ben swept up into all this? Or a flower child type like Ophelia, who in a pivotal scene with Hayek, in which “O,” as she calls herself, while free associating all philosophical namby-pamby, is asked by Hayek, “Do all American talk like this? Do you ever think about your future?” The drug lord chick never seemed so adult.
It’s no accident the word “savages” here refers both to the ruthless drug cartel guys, and Americans with no cultural values, depending on who’s doing the finger-pointing. Del Toro calls the the gringos “Cheech and Chon.” Stone both wallows in the muck and finds gallows humor in it. If the film weren’t as entertaining as anything I’ve seen this year, I might have been able to find fault. As is, it’s the third really good film this year dealing with various stages of innocents dragged into the drug wars (besides the aforementioned Miss Bala, see the forthcoming Swedish flick, Easy Money).
Stone’s getting the most out of the three young actors here is topped only by his throwing down veteran scene-stealers like Del Toro and John Travolta, whose scene together seethes with raw tension. Travolta, who coincidentally offscreen is in dire need of some positive PR, conveys a coolness and a subsequent desperation with equal skill as he plays a crooked cop. Emile Hirsch is around as a highly amusing financial whiz who launders Ben and Chon’s considerable cash. Damon Bichir, fresh off the excellent A Better Life, is one of Hayek’s guys. Savvy character actor Shea Whigham plays a lawyer who gets both his kneecaps shot by a sick son-of-a-bitch posing as a landscaper. It’s relatively one of the film’s tamer scenes.
It all feels like classic cinema, with a dash of guilty-pleasure, quasi-Scarface spice thrown in (Stone wrote the screenplay for Brian DePalma’s Scarface). As Tony Montana might say, “You wanna play rough?” In Savages, both sides play as rough as can be imagined. The difference here is since no one is shielded from vulnerability and the stakes and methods are light years beyond those simpler days, the 2012 version of the Oliver Stone cartoon just got chillingly real.
4.25 “You Wanna Play Rough?”‘s (out of 5)
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