Oliver Stone’s latest full-length
feature, “Savages,” was released in July
of last year in the US. It’s finally being released here uncut.
I watched it with my friend
and short format movie-reviewer, Manuel, and he loved it. I left the screening
room feeling like the film had some sort of identity crisis. Maybe I should
blame it on the Stone films I grew up with: Salvador, Platoon (where I first
laid eyes on and fell in love with Johnny Depp), Wall Street, JFK and Natural
Born Killers.
He was constantly making
statements about politics, the US government, foreign policy, economy, the
media, reportage, war and the current zeitgeist. So there I was sitting through
“Savages” and looking around for that Stone statement on the drug war, or maybe
on the legalization of marijuana.
Instead I got something that
was sometimes stylish, sometimes thrilling, sometimes funny, often dark, bloody
and violent. While it had brutal scenes of torture and murder to depict the
ruthlessness of how Mexican drug cartel’s operate, I wonder how much of it real
or fantasy?
Ex-Navy Seal Chon (Taylor
Kitsch) and botanist-entrepreneur (Aaron Johnson) peacenik Ben run a small
independent of producing some excellent cannabis in sunshiny Southern
California. Mexico’s Baja Cartel gets a whiff of this and wants in.
O (short for Ophelia) is the
woman both best friends share—which makes her a target for the cartel seeking
leverage on Ben and Chon’s operations. O
is played by Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, who narrates the beginning and the end
of the film.
Apart from having a
ridiculously good-looking functioning love triangle at the center of story, you
also have Salma Hayek as the vicious “Reyna Elena” of the Baja Cartel in her
high fashion get ups and Cleopatra hair. I keep wondering if she is based on an
actual character.
Rounding out the main cast is
Benicio del Toro as the absolutely creepy carter “enforcer” Lado—the man who
shoots, burns, tortures in the name of the drug business and John Travolta as
Dennis, the DEA agent with questionable allegiances.
I thought Savages crossed a
lot into Tarantino / Pulp Fiction territory.
And because of my previous view of Stone, I kept wondering whether he
wanted us to take this movie seriously or not. Especially with the ending.
(I also saw “A Good Day to
Die Hard” and while I heard some applause from the audience at the special
screening, I thought it was downright awful. It was a textbook action movie
with a forced plot, and one implausible scenario after another. I leave with a
quote from an old Filipino film, “huwag mo nang buhayin ang bangkay.”)
"Savages"
opens on Feb. 20 exclusively at Glorietta 4, Greenbelt 3, Trinoma, Market! Market!
and Alabang Town Center.
Do all marijuana entrepreneurs look like this?
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