By THOMAS BOND
Now this is the kind of film you’d expect from Oliver Stone. Filled with copious amount of gritty, violent action, sex, drugs and Stone’s trademark visual flair, “Savages” is his best work since 1994’s “Natural Born Killers”. It tells the tale of O, a young California girl who lives with her two boyfriends, in the small Laguna Beach kingdom they’ve created for themselves with a lucrative pot business. They’re not all bad, they sell a lot of their product for medicinal purposes and build up villages in third-world countries. In fact, they’re almost ready to get out of the business altogether. Until the queen of a powerful Mexican cartel forces their hand and kidnaps O. The two mostly peace-loving friends have to decide what’s most important to them, and set off on a bloody path of revenge and destruction to rescue O. The film is alive with energy, and the camera captures the sets and locations with a cool sizzle. Most impressive are the characters that Stone and his actors have crafted, all of them unique and quirky and unpredictable. Benicio Del Toro is in near Oscar-worthy form as the leader of a “lawn-care” crew that does a little more than lawn cleanup, as he maniacally twists his mustache. He’s great. And so is Travolta, Kitsch, Johnson, Hayek, and even Lively. The ending is both an exciting, wild twist of a surprise, and a Hollywood cop out. But hey, nobody’s perfect.
Movie info from IMDb.com
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