Film Review: Savages

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This article titled “Savages – review” was written by Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian on Thursday 20th September 2012 20.00 UTC

I have experienced some remarkable audience reactions in my time. Yelps of fear. Shouts of laughter. Cheering. But I  heard something unprecedented in this incredibly tiresome and unendurably long film by Oliver Stone, featuring deathly performances from actors who have had a pint of formaldehyde injected into their necks. The audience gave a growl of incredulous group rage when one scene was revealed to be some sort of fantasy or dream sequence and we were now expected to sit through basically the same fatuous nonsense again – perhaps because the director had shot two versions and just had to include both in this fantastically bloated and flatulent movie.

Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the stars, show that they are not just pretty faces. No, they are also incredibly bad actors. They play Chon and Ben, two supercool drug dealers who have made a fortune plying top-quality dope in the Laguna Beach area of California. Ben is a brainy and decent guy who totally wants to supply poor people in the developing world with clean water facilities. Chon is a muscly ex-soldier, whose military buddies show up at opportune moments to provide firepower. Things turn nasty when a Mexican drug cartel moves in on their turf and kidnaps their shared girlfriend O (Blake Lively), for whom they are the Jules et Jim of drugs. O is short for Ophelia, incidentally, a literary allusion that turns out to have zero significance. These Mexicans are led by the imperious Elena, played by Salma Hayek, and her brutish enforcer, played by Benicio Del Toro, both playing up to broad stereotypes. And there’s a crooked DEA cop, played by John Travolta.

Of the latter players, it’s hard to decide who gives the worst performance. Hayek is like Johnny Depp giving a drag-queen impersonation of Winona Ryder doing a homage to Luis Guzmán. Travolta is phoning it in from a part of the world that doesn’t have telephones, and Del Toro, charmlessly grunting his way through the lines, deserves a special Oscar for most unattractive moustache.

Sadly, Savages plays up to Stone’s worst tendencies: machismo, bombast and self-indulgence, and the factor that could conceivably have made this movie tolerable – humour – is off the menu. The icy wit of Pulp Fiction is nowhere, and neither is the docu-realist fervour of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic. At two hours and 11 minutes, the picture has ballooned beyond control and there is no dramatic point or weight to any of it. There is savagery in being as boring as this.

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