Savages

2012 drug movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Successful marijuana growers battle dangerous Mexican drug lords, and unfortunately, the love of both of their lives gets involved. They have to go to drastic measures to save her.

I am having a very difficult time understanding the relationship that drives this story. You've got the two pot guys--Buddhist Ben and war veteran and general badass Chon--and the one girl played by Blake Lively and named after a Hamlet character. And they're all in love, but it's not a love triangle. No, it's this relationship where they all live together and Blake Lively screws them both and everybody's happy with it. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don't see how that works. And if that doesn't work, the whole movie doesn't really work. I didn't like any of the three major characters. Taylor Kitsch played the badass, and he was just your typical movie badass and nothing more--tattoos, haircut, muscles, scowl, and not much else. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was the hippie, another stereotype more than a real human being. And Blake Lively was nothing more than a pretty face and later a damsel in distress. Oh, and she provides some bad narration filled with terrible puns--war-gasms, a play on Buddhist/Baddhist, a joint venture. Those and the Shakespeare references just were a little too cutesy-clever, especially for a character who was completely bland the rest of the time. Travolta's character had potential, kind of an unlikable pussy. And Travolta's not bad, but he's not really in the movie enough to really get the chance to nail down the character. Del Toro, Demian Bichir (who I know as one of the actors who has gotten a chance to fondle Mary-Louise Parker), and Salma Hayek (wearing a terrible wig) all get parts that Mexico can be proud of. Del Toro does his best to make his character completely despicable, but it's nothing we really haven't seen already. And that's probably the biggest problem with Savages--it just doesn't take any chances. There's some of Stone's experimental trickery that you get with his non-historical dramas like Natural Born Killers or U-Turn, but here it just seems mainstream and gratuitous. The biggest trick of all is when Stone provides two separate endings. Unfortunately, neither one of them is satisfying. And neither is this movie. It lacks inspiration, seeming to borrow ideas from television dramas more than anything else, and never develops the edge that it probably would like to have.