Saw 'Savages'........

FAST FRED

500+ Posts
.......and found it was like much of Oliver Stone's movie making: always controversial, probably accurate and perhaps even legendary, but often overblown, occasionally under focused and overall without much value on any level after you've seen it and left the theater.

However, I was entertained.

Spoilers!!!!!

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Remember "No Country for Old Men" with its interesting story, genuine suspense, sudden action, good acting and a great villain?

I thought that was a really good film.

Worth seeing multiple times, if you're into that sort of thing.

Well, I could rename Stone's latest "No Country for Young Men" (just for the sake of doing so) and I found it too long, slow moving, pretty dull except for all the shocking violence and fairly predictable until the "pick your outcome" blow up at the very end.

When any final denouement went up in smoke.

The characters and the acting?

Benicio Del Toro's snaky, opportunistic, evil "Lado" is certainly the most memorable antagonist we've seen on film since Javier Bardem's "Anton Chigurh," but John Travolta's performance seemed too tongue in cheek for me, merely reprising his "Chili Palmer" role from "Get Shorty," and I felt gossip girl Blake Lively as "O" was pensively channeling Gwyneth Paltrow throughout her spacey performance.

However, the spacey part was completely in character, since she was smoking cannabis sporting 33% THC.

The two male protagonists who shared "O," played by Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson, had combined portrayals that didn't provide as much back story as did either "The Falcon" or "The Snowman" and Salma Hayek's admittedly decent portrait of a female running a big drug cartel actually captivated my interest less than Mary-Louis Parker did playing small time drug dealing mom "Nancy Botwin" in "Weeds."

The "contest" between the Mexicans and the Americans over which feuding drug culture had the most expertise available on hand and/or the more savage behavior on call was the interesting thing that I took away from this visceral study.

Plenty of realistic, believable, gruesome, bloody violence, but not all that much sex considering what I'd hoped for after a promising start, and an ending so lackluster that even after two different versions were offered it still fell short for me.

I didn't read the book.

But more and better music (a la Quentin Tarantino) might've helped this lengthy movie, which was often slowed by narration.

And that second WTF ending left me wondering why Oliver Stone blunted (that verb chosen on purpose) this otherwise gritty storyline with it.

Did the book have two endings?

I simply needed and wanted something better from this director of "Platoon," "Wall Street," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Natural Born Killers".

Something more up to the excellence I saw in those flicks.

Instead, for me, "Savages" was too much like his "Any Given Sunday," rehashed using a different display of violence from the drug cartel wars than what's provided by the NFL.

JMO.

I hope y'all find more to enjoy and appreciate about "Savages" than I did.

The second, almost comedic by comparison, ending was the big deal breaker for me, because it validated stuff in the rest of the movie which I found lacking (and mentioned above) and I thought that, in turn, invalidated an otherwise better flick.

Recommended for those who need to see it, as did I.

cool.gif


Your thoughts?
 
Haven't seen it , but a great review and pretty much what I expected. Thanks.

I'll probably catch it on Netflix, or cable.
 
Third:

I have some mixed feelings about the movie, esp. the way the ending was handled. That said, it's worth seeing, and I recommend seeing it on alarge screen. The cinematography is amazing.
 
I haven't read your entire review, because I haven't seen the movie yet, and you warned of spoilers, but I take issue with your assertion that Oliver Stone is 'probably accurate.'...he directed 'Any Given Sunday' and couldn't even get the fact that the away team wears white jerseys for the football games.
 
alright, not always the visiting team, but ALWAYS one of the teams. In the movie there were times when both teams had dark jerseys, and it looked preposterous.
 
I thought the casting was the weakest link. The protagonists were forgettable. The blonde needed to be more seductive. Travolta has jumped the shark for any role not an obviously older man. Del Toro is stereotyped.
 

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