Savages (9/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 130 minutes.

Not for children.

When Oliver Stone puts his mind to it, he can really make a movie. This one is filled with brutal graphic violence and has constant tension. I asked my friend how she liked it. Her response, "It's riveting, but I don't like it." That might be a fairly common reaction.

Set in Laguna Beach, California, and based on Don Winslow's best-selling crime novel, named one of the New York Times' top ten books of 2010, it's about two young Americans, Taylor Kitsch, a former Navy Seal, and his closest friend, Aaron Johnson, a peaceful, charitable botanist, who cultivate good marijuana, and how they get entangled with the Mexican Drug Lords, in the persons of Benecio Del Toro, one of the most cold-blooded killers ever seen in film, Demiá Bichir, and Salma Hayek, the materfamilias of the crime family. Kitsch and Johnson live with and share the affections of Blake Lively, a beautiful free-spirit who loves both of them equally, literally. The tension starts with the first scene and never lets up.

The film doesn't really make the point, but it epitomizes the idiocy of making marijuana illegal. All this crime and violence and money are the result of a society unable to allow citizens to make up their own minds whether or not to use marijuana, a basically harmless substance that alters awareness about as much as alcohol without the side effects of alcohol. It makes no sense to make marijuana illegal (for the record, I'm not a user). Worse, to criminalize medical marijuana is criminal in itself. Talk about mindless, unsympathetic puritanism! Why not burn users at the stake?

Anyway, that really doesn't have anything to do with the movie, although apparently Stone is on the record as favoring the legalization of marijuana. The acting is terrific, but what really sets this film apart is the way Stone keeps up the pace for 2 hours and ten minutes. The tension never lets up. It is graphically violent, so much that you occasionally want to avert your eyes, but it does capture the heartlessness of the fiends who run the drug trade. I did not like the silly, teasing, way Stone ended it, an insult to his audience. But, that aside, this is a high-quality film that should be rewarded in award season.