Fridae

Oliver Stone's latest opens with a cue from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, opening with a voiceover by the protagonist in which we are brought to notice that he is in fact, dead. In Savages, the one saying that is O (Blake Lively), who warns us that just because she's telling her story, it doesn't mean that she's alive by the end.

O, as played by the screen's newest all-American girl Blake Lively, is a tall trophy blonde shared by two progressive-minded entrepreneurs who just happen to be criminals because of the goods they hawk: marijuana. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson) run one of the most successful independent joints, pun fully intended, in Laguna Beach, California. Their partnership has allowed them to live the American Dream in a very short time. Ben is the brains behind the business, a Buddhist progressive who otherwise builds homes and delivers water to Indonesian and African children when he isn't hawking his pot. Chon is a war veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan whose military expertise and contacts puts the business in safe hands when it comes to dealing with their nastier clientele. O was actually born Ophelia, and being loved equally by both men, is the runaway, lost innocent who symbolizes everything that each men misses and looks forward to.

As the opening lines borrowing from one of the greatest Filmes Noires ever made signal to the audience, Savages is intent on being a modern-day crime epic in the Noir tradition, a film bent on eviscerating the American Dream by subjecting its characters to a world where the best laid plans often go awry. As expected, things go wrong pretty soon. Ben and Chon find themselves crossing the powerful Baja Cartel, led by the widowed drug baroness 'La Reina' Elena Sanchez (Salma Hayek), and aided by her ruthless enforcer Lado (Benicio Del Toro). Watching all the proceedings bemusedly is the sleazy corrupt DEA agent Dennis (John Travolta), playing all sides to get his cut from whoever he can.

The fact that it's O, the most overtly symbolic and uninteresting character who narrates the film pretty much sums up where Savages makes its earliest wrong turn. O is one of those characters for whom who one look at her would inform you everything about her background; it doesn't take a genius to find out that she is from a wealthy but loveless family and a neglected wild child who turns to pot for comfort. In Noir such a character is the sweetheart, who generally should be much more a cipher than the femme fatale is because she always represents what is nourishing and fulfilling for the morally-compromised antiheroes. To have her narrate the film in Stone's case takes away much of what her character stands for, that elusiveness and mysteriousness, and just makes her another character. It's hard to feel the angelic mystery of a Noir sweetheart when she's constantly yakking to you in voice over in a style bordering on something approaching a docudrama. The belabored, exhibitionistic screenplay by Stone, Shane Salerno and Don Winslow pretty much spells out all its points to you in large neon letters, leaving you with very little room for the mental or emotional engagement that can really stoke the heightened appreciation of cinema.

It doesn't help that Ben, Chon and O are also pretty uninteresting characters compared to the supporting players that surround them. The three are basically neo-hippie versions of F Scott Fitzgerald's Gilded Age Vanities floating about on an ephemeral breeze. More of a walking Vanity Fair shoot than a bunch of actual people. Elena, Lado and Dennis, it seems, seem far more vibrant, compromised and complicated in their constant aspirations to bourgeois respectability in spite of their criminal dealings. They chart their careers, plan for their future and care for their families and friends, and seem far more invested with an inner life than our antiheroes. The film however, quickly brushes these aside as Stone and his writers throw in every single trope they can to pad out their crime saga: there's heists, double crosses, informants, Cook Island accounts, heavy handed and cliched comparisons of criminality to entrepreneurship, shootouts, twist endings and estranged daughters. The film, running a little over two hours, practically feels much longer because of Stone's 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach, the film's terrible use of its omniscient narrator, and its unengaging, generic antiheroes.

Savages is a big, ambitious, exhibitionistic crime epic that takes a lot to say very little. For all its bells and whistles, it's remarkably formulaic and predictable.