Savages (2012)

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta, Benicio del Toro, Salma Hayek, Demián Bichir

Director: Oliver Stone

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller

Rating: B-

While watching Savages I found that if you suspend your disbelief surrounding the plot and characters it’s actually a pretty good movie.  Definitely not Oliver Stone’s best, but far from being his worst either.  There were a lot of elements about the plot that kind of confused me a bit, mostly in regards to character motivations, but once I let the journey take me on its course it was a fun little trip.  Weird and rather unexpected, but definitely fun.

Savages tells the story of Ben (Taylor-Johnson) and Chon (Kitsch), best friends and marijuana growers, and their girlfriend O (Lively).  While Chon was in the armed forces he smuggled marijuana seeds into the US from Afghanistan and since then he and Ben have grown a particularly potent strain that is in high demand.  It is this strain that brings them to the attention of cartel leader Elena (Hayek) and her thugs, Alex (Bichir) and Lado (del Toro).  Elena tries to buy out their business, but after Ben and Chon insult her and make plans to flee the country she has O kidnapped in order to make them toe the line.  From there things all go to shit as Ben and Chon attempt to find a way to get O back.

For starters, I really enjoyed the way that Stone shot this movie. He kind of balances the tone between being some Hollywood flick to being an artsy film with a point – I’m not certain if Savages really has a deeper message, but it presents itself as if it does. I enjoyed the narrative that Blake Lively’s character provides, especially given as it’s preceded by the note that even though she’s telling us the story it doesn’t mean that she’s alive in the end. We kind of lose the narration in the middle, which is probably for the best, but it comes back in the end and I think provides a good wrap to the story. It’s weird… this is not a really deep movie, but between the way it was shot, with the variety of angles and the different angles, and the tone that the narration takes it really feels like it’s making some profound statement. I was almost left with the feeling at the end that I needed to rewatch the movie just to figure out what that statement was, but at the same time felt as though I didn’t really miss anything by not having grasped that statement.

Actually, that's somewhat of a lie.  I did get an idea as to what the some of the statements that Stone was attempting to make, although I'm not really sure of them.  There was a lot, obviously, on drugs, but I wasn't exactly sure if Savages was supposed to be anti-drugs or not.  Likewise, I wasn't sure if he was trying to be anti-violence or not - there are some characters in the cartel that you like and others that you don't, while Chon is very much in favour of violence and yet it's Ben, the pacifist, that you spend the entire time wanting to die.  Or that's how I felt about him, but regardless it's his pacifist actions that cause many of the problems.  In the end, though, I think it's the statement that acts as the problem of the movie.  Stone is trying to say something in Savages but the way he presents his message is rather convoluted and confusing, so at the end you're not really sure what it is that he's trying to say.  While there are some great works out there that do such a thing magnificently - Shakespeare comes to mind - there isn't much magnificence to Savages.  The message is lost simply because of a poor direction, or script, or something.  I'm not really sure where, I just know that the film probably would have been better without it.