Savages: Curiously Bloodless

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Oliver Stone:  he's one of these master craftsmen, like the Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg, Ripley Scott, who can't produce a bad film, technically speaking, but also can't seem to see into the depths of the stories that they are telling.  All the story is there, the technical elements of making a film, the characters are interesting enough, and the plot promising.  Yet there's a bloodless quality in a film that should be much more bloody.  There's a lack of viscera in a film that should be fundamentally visceral.  But what is offered is a somewhat ugly but surface take on violence and cruelty and vicious business.  It's almost a pastiche of gangster/cartel film moments and building blocks, strung together in the prescribed way, but without...what...maybe embodying it?  Something's missing.

The setup is pretty simple:  two high school friends go into business selling extremely potent marijuana, the result of Ben's talent with botany.  Chon is the muscle for the duo, providing the occasional corrective measures when the genteel world of Laguna Beach grass business gets messy.  They apparently go along for 6 years like this, till an aggressive Mexican drug cartel, beset by business problems south of the border, begins attempts at hostile takeovers north of the border.  Chon and Ben's business comes in their sights and they're given an offer they can't refuse.  Which they refuse.  And then their shared girlfriend, O (shortened from Ophelia), is kidnapped for leverage, and the two work to get her back.  And there's a corrupt DEA agent played by John Travolta.  And Penelope Cruz plays the ruthless cartel head, who runs much of her business by Skype.  She comes north to visit her daughter, who is ashamed of her mother, and lite mayhem ensues.  And then the nominal good guys win and the nominal bad woman loses, but the creepy enforcer (Benecio de Tores) takes over the cartel with the creepy politician, and the DEA agent protects the boys and gets credit for busting Cruz.  With a strange fantasy ending before the real ending.

So, that's pretty straightforward.  Yet I couldn't really give a shit.  About the drama, the characters, the cartel chieftain who had suffered losses of her sons and husband, the DEA agent whose family is threatened, etc.  Not that they weren't potentially sympathetic characters, or that the story isn't potentially rich with both human drama and political/cultural commentary, but simply that none of that was in the film.  

For instance:  the boys, after robbing the cartel of $3 million (killing 7 cartel employees), then use their wiz-bang financial fixer guy to create a fiction about him being the leak in the organization.  That man is then tortured by de Toro's character, and when he confesses under duress, Ben is told to burn him to death.  Well, that should be high drama, right?  Ben, the Buddhist pot-head and philanthropist, has to enter the gritty underbelly of his own world and participate in an aspect he's outsourced to Chon, and what we see about his inner world is a scene where his face hardens.  That's our peek into his heart, a perfunctory conversion or baptism in violence, and on we go.  It's like the movie is a piece of music in which all the chords are played as single notes.  

Or another example:  when they go to rob the money counting operation in the desert, they bring along three or four other ex-military, and set up an ambush in which they quickly dispatch the "bad guys" (who are probably just low-level flunkies on the illegal analogue to working in a warehouse).  There's some cars exploding, and a scene where two guys walk up the road and shoot some guards.  And one of the money carriers gets shot by Chon (when Ben can't pull the trigger) and blood splashes on Ben's Mexican death mask.  And yet it plays out with a strange kind of either aloofness or detachment.  It had all the elements of something I should and in many other films would emotionally care about, but when it ended and Ben was puking out of the car, I just didn't feel much.  

I wonder if Stone got into the film making and started getting confused about what he was doing there, but contractually couldn't get out of it.  You look at, say, "Natural Born Killers" or "Platoon," or even Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," and you see gut wrenching films (in different ways), but with "Savages," you know the gut is there, you just feel it's kind of empty.  I imagine somewhere into shooting he kind of got distracted, maybe a crisis in his family, and when his minions came to him he'd just wave and nod and say, "Yeah, that's sounds good enough."  What could have been a fun and stylish genre film turns out to be a dull and lust-less exercise.