"SAVAGES" — ★ — Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Blake Lively, Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, John Travolta, Demian Bichir, Emile Hirsch; R (vulgar language, nudity, explicit sex, graphic violence, extreme gore and drug use); in wide release
With "Savages," director Oliver Stone sets aside the highfalutin' airs of his last few pictures ("Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," "W," "World Trade Center") and cuts loose with his idea of a fun summer movie — a lurid, fast-paced thriller about two California pot farmers whose mutual girlfriend is kidnapped by a rival Mexican cartel. This is the Stone of "Natural Born Killers" and "U Turn" and "Any Given Sunday," a director whose flair for absurdist excess and merciless satire can turn off viewers of milder sensibilities.
But "Savages" is something those other movies were not: Aggressively, defiantly stupid. Based on Don Winslow's well-regarded page-turner (he also co-wrote the script), the movie has a propulsive energy that suits Stone well as he recounts exactly how Chon (Taylor Kitsch), an ex-Navy SEAL and veteran of two tours in Afghanistan, and Ben (Aaron Johnson), a college grad who majored in business and botany, built a marijuana empire that turned them into millionaires. Using surreal visuals and montage, Stone lays in the details needed to make you buy the movie's central premise — that these two ordinary guys, with no connection to organized crime and no experience in the drug trade, became happy-go-lucky beachfront kingpins.
Those early scenes also introduce one of the film's most unlikely conceits: the lovely, bird-brained Ophelia (Blake Lively), who prefers to go by "O" and lives in carnal communion with the two guys, and sometimes just sharing her bed with both of them at the same time.
Even for an Oliver Stone movie, the scenario is an awful lot to swallow: What kind of woman would ever agree to this?
But you go with it, at least initially, because the entire plot hinges on their harmonious three-way union, a bromance with a woman thrown in for sexual release.
So when Ophelia is kidnapped by Elena (Salma Hayek), a Mexican drug lord who wants to force them to share their profits, the guys resort to desperate measures to get her back. How else will they have sex?
The title of "Savages" is meant as a bitter joke: Everyone in the movie, from Elena's murderous goons (led by Benicio del Toro) to a crooked DEA agent (John Travolta) to the likable heroes, will commit extreme acts in order to get what they want. The war on drugs turns everyone into animals.
The rest of "Savages" is supposed to be pure, if brutal, entertainment, pulp fiction with an unusually graphic punch.
"Savages" is rated R for vulgar language, nudity, explicit sex, graphic violence, extreme gore and drug use; running time: 127 minutes.