An unconventional relationship takes a backseat in Savages, Oliver Stone’s disappointingly conventional film about the drug business.
USA
3*
Director:
Oliver Stone
Screenwriters:
Shane Salerno
Oliver Stone
Don Winslow
Director of Photography:
Dan Mindel
Running time: 130 minutes
Drug films are usually all the same. The build-up shows one or two likeable stoners lounging on a beach dreaming of making it big, so they start off with their knowledge of fine weed and hatch a business plan that ultimately makes them so rich they don’t have any space left in their house to put all the cash. Bunkers full of genetically engineered super marijuana appear below the house, but, before they know it, the friends have turned on each other, there is some big shootout, and everybody loses.
Oliver Stone, the director of significant films in the 1980s and 1990s who hasn’t been at the top of his game since the landmark projects that were JFK and Natural Born Killers in the early ’90s, has fashioned a drug film that feels slightly different from the others, but not much.
The central relationship – two guys and a girl – in Savages is the film’s most important hook, but while it sets up a nice bit of drama, the questions it raises (or rather, the questions some of the characters raise about this romantic combo) are never addressed. Only near the end of the film, as the two guys drive towards a meeting place in Southern California, not far from the border with Mexico, do they finally express their love for each other, but, despite the camera swirling above them, this exchange has nothing on Thelma and Louise‘s famous final moments.
The girl in the trio, O. (Blake Lively, who acts like she’s being fed her lines through an earpiece), believes her living situation is perfect because she shares her life with these two attractive men who seem to share her willingly with each other. But, as the crime boss Elena (Salma Hayek) makes clear in one of their heart-to-heart discussions, they very likely share her only because she means less to either of them than they mean to each other. But nothing comes of this very convincing insight into the men’s psychology.
The two men, botany and business graduate Ben (Aaron Johnson) and former soldier in Afghanistan Chon (Taylor Kitsch), have grown some of the most potent marijuana anyone can produce, thanks to the fusion of Ben’s green fingers and Chon’s sticky fingers (he brought back some premium seeds from a tour in Central Asia). They are running a multimillion-dollar business, but Ben wants to move on and invest more in helping children in Africa.
Chon isn’t quite sure what he wants yet and spends the day, as O. puts it, giving her orgasms, while he just has “wargasms”. No, this is not the informative nor informed kind of writing one would expect from Stone, but perhaps it is not entirely out of place in this genre.
Despite their not being sure exactly where they stand – both with each other and the small business they run – they go to a meeting with a representative from a nasty-looking Mexican drug cartel, whose skills in the art of decapitation are well-known. The Mexicans make them an offer they plan to refuse, but, before they can start a new life elsewhere, O. is taken prisoner, and her life remains in the balance until the end of the film.
Elena, the head of the cartel, is a woman who seems to be in complete control of her business, one she inherited from her late husband. Hayek is unimpressive as the drug queen, and the black wig on her head in this film makes her look a bit like Elvira, though without the semi-beehive. The viewer is kept in suspense throughout as to whether her soft-spoken demeanour is actually just cold-heartedness or whether she is genuinely vulnerable, as suggested by the fraught relationship with her estranged daughter.
Benicio Del Toro and John Travolta also star in the film, both playing to type, the first as a drug dealer, the second as a bent cop also heavily involved in the trade, though one shouldn’t underestimate Del Toro’s character, who, despite a very bad mullet, can dispatch his enemies at the drop of a hat.
Savages starts with O. telling us, “Just because I’m telling you this story, doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it.” Stone has a nifty surprise in store for his audience at the end of the film, as a big twist is suddenly twisted out of shape even more. The film will give you your fix of mellow drama punctuated by sudden acts of violence, particularly when Del Toro wields a pistol, but overall the film lacks a vision for depicting with real insight the drama of the drug trade and the three young people caught up in it. We don’t get any real joy out of the characters using drugs, but nor do we get a firmer grip on their lives beyond their smoke-filled bubble.