Oliver Stone's "Savages" Deals and Delivers James Verniere - The Edge
go to original July 6, 2012

“I have orgasms; he has war-gasms,” is my choice for nuttiest movie line of the summer of 2012.

It is spoken in the opening scenes of Oliver Stone’s beautifully shot, sexy, incredibly violent drug-dealing drama “Savages” by the film’s stoned, California-girl heroine and not-so-reliable narrator “O” for Ophelia (Blake Lively). “O” also coyly warns us that just because she narrates the story doesn’t mean she’ll be alive at the end of it. How very “meta” of her.

The “he” she refers to is former Navy SEAL and multiple-tour combat vet Chon (Taylor Kitsch), who together with his best friend and partner Ben (Aaron Johnson) has developed the most powerful and coveted California-grown/Afghan-hybrid weed in existence. While Chon fought in the Middle East, Ben went to Berkeley to study business and botany. Together, he and Chon are entrepreneurs and the yin and yang of their “Jules and Jim”-style threesome.

The trio live in idyllic splendor in a spectacular cliff-side house on Laguna Beach, and the men appear to be able to share “O” without conflict or jealousy. She loves them both.

Into this ganja-smoke-filled Garden of Eden comes a serpent known as Elena (Salma Hayek), the greediest, most ferocious, dressed-to-kill, drug dealing bruja in Mexico.

Her right-hand man Lado (a bestial Benicio Del Toro) is a leering, hulking, natural-born killer, who wears a death’s head mask when he is doing really bad things and whose speciality is beheading those who displease Elena. That is, after heinously torturing them. To make Chon and Ben bend to her will, Elena has Lado abduct the thing they love the most: “O.”

Based on a 2010 novel by co-screenwriter Don Winslow, “Savages” is a lushly cinematic experience.

Stone, whose penchant for real-life Jekyll and Hyde characters has spawned a virtual house of mirrors here, is as in love with blood-splattered floors and decapitated bodies as he is with Lively’s sun-kissed face and tawny flanks. The juxtaposition is suitably -jarring and weirdly funny.

Ben is the do-gooder Buddha buff, while Chon is the Conan the Barbarian. To succeed, they will both have to don Santa Muerte masks and “Go all Sunni” and savage on their enemies.

Albeit familiar in its crime-movie tropes, starting with that chainsaw reminder that Stone wrote Brian De Palma’s landmark 1983 “Scarface,” “Savages” is filmmaking of a very high order.

Stone finds the hellish humor in this modern-day hell and lavishes as much time on the beauty of his protagonists as on bullets crashing through craniums, a bullwhip used on a human face and a person in the horrific embrace of a burning automobile tire.

Hayek’s Elena is this film’s real-life Cruella De Vil. As a comically corrupt U.S. federal agent, a bald John Travolta is hilarious. Demian Bichir of “A Better Life” is all suave menace as a lawyer working for Elena, until the table is turned. Del Toro is scarier here than in “The Wolfman.” Kitsch and Johnson are not exactly Butch and Sundance, but they’re close. Some may object to the film’s tricky ending or its genre-movie trappings. But I didn’t look at my watch once.

(“Savages” contains drug use, extreme graphic violence, sexually suggestive scenes and profanity.)

james.verniere@bostonherald.com

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