Savages

Well, that sucked. I wish I could get a refund. Look, I'm just flat tired of seeing people smoke pot in redundancy for an entire film. Yes, this deals with the volatile nature of the relationship between drugs and violence. The two normally come hand in hand. Does Oliver Stone break any new ground? Oh, man, that voice over from Blake Lively made my ears bleed, and her delivery had about as much life as corpse on a slab. Del Toro is just an unstable lunatic who has a mania on his face the entire time he appears on screen. He has an uneasy fixation on Lively once she is captured. The plot consists of two drug dealers/suppliers with marijuana that has a potency unlike any other crop, seeds brought from Afghanistan by one of the two buddies who purposely enlisted in the Navy Seals just to score the dope. Lively fucks both of them, loves them, and revels in what their lifestyle affords the trio. Stone, as you might imagine, protects Lively, meaning she doesn't appear naked while screwing around with both actors, so anyone hoping for that will be sorely disappointed. Damn, if that Selma Hayek isn't one fine woman. She sure can cut off the emotional filters when it comes to those who earn her wrath, torture and beheadings steady outcomes for those who cross her in one way or another. I'm honest, this is just another run-of-the-mill drug movie. Nothing special. The heroes of this film (are they, really?) decide to strike back at Hayek who wants to bully her struggling cartel (it has fallen on hard times since a member of her crime family split to form his own) into their financially lucrative business by kidnapping Lively. They keep her in a gross living quarters (it looks like a dilapidated trailer) containing crappy furniture and a bed enclosed inside a fenced cage. Del Toro is always there to feed her, spend time with her, even providing smoke from dope mouth-to-mouth (yes, there is a line of spit shared between the two, yuck). There's plenty of violence. A head caves in after a sniper hit, one poor fellow is whipped so badly his face is barely recognizable and his eyeball is hanging out (after admitting his betrayal, which isn't true since one of the American "heroes" sets him up thanks to their sophisticated network of tech nerds, he's set on fire!), and one of two endings has a lot of people left dead from a gunfight right out of the OK Coral (Stone actually shoots this in the desert with accompanying spaghetti western music). John Travolta pops up as a shady DEA agent working all sides (his means of manipulating Del Toro, who seems to be preparing to kill him and his daughters is quite masterful) and how he plays a hand in the final conclusion when the two heroes kidnap Hayek's daughter for an exchange to get back Lively is rather clever. So it has its moments, but not enough to having warranted me spending 10 bucks on a movie ticket. How the three seem to slither out of their predicament I didn't buy for one second; I don't think they would be able to orchestrate all of this to their advantage. I think this movie hinges on that actually...do you believe these guys could pull off a feisty back-and-forth with a drug cartel? I didn't.