SAVAGES (Universal)
Director: Oliver Stone
Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, John Travolta, Benicio Del Toro
As a director, Oliver Stone enjoyed a rarely-matched string of critical and pop cultural hit movies from the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born On The Fourth Of July, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon … these are all brilliant, genre-redefining films that have been watched (and re-watched) for decades.
Stone’s string of successes ground to a screeching halt with the release of U Turn in 1997, a film riddled with bizarre sequences and flat performances.
Stone’s films amassed 31 Academy Award nominations before 1995. They haven’t had a single nomination since, a drought that started with the bat-poop insane U Turn, even though Stone still pumps out a good movie every now and then (Any Given Sunday, World Trade Center, W.).
Savages is more like U Turn than it is like anything else in Stone’s back catalogue.
And it fails for many of the same reasons: the overly-complicated plot – involving a pair of cannabis farmers, one of whom is a retired soldier who found the seeds for their strong strain of pot while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, who get into trouble with a Mexican drug cartel after turning down the gang’s offer of a partnership – is jam-packed with strange, illogical sequences and poorly conceived characters.
It doesn’t help that a cast of capable actors – Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek and Demian Bichir, to name three – are supporting three horribly miscast leads in Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively and Aaron Johnson, none of whom seem capable of carrying a movie of any kind, let alone one by Oliver Stone.
It isn’t all bad: Savages is fun to watch occasionally, and its two hour length flies past. Stone is an expert on visuals, and the blu-ray presentation is the best way to see the various swathes of colour the director uses. Savages is a gorgeous looking film, though that ultimately can’t overcome the problems in other areas.
This is not a boring movie, or a particularly bad movie, by any stretch. It just isn’t a good one. Disappointing stuff.
Video Quality: 1080p resolution with MPEG-4 AVC codec. Audio Quality: Lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. Special Features: Cinema and Extended versions, Deleted Scenes, 2 audio commentaries, Stone Cold Savages: 5-part making-of featurette.
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