Savages is what happens when a great director decides to take on a project that’s beneath him, and for all the wrong reasons. It was evident from Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers that the director was desperate almost to the point of derangement to surpass his younger rivals as the most cutting-edge filmmaker alive. Some feel he succeeded. I feel that he failed, and tellingly he abandoned the frenetic style of that film. The same itch never left Stone, though, and on the heels of several “respectable” films like World Trade Center and W., it seems the urge to prove how edgy he could still be overwhelmed him. The result is a would-be hip and sexy crime drama that feels so familiar that you can match almost every scene to memorable precedents in an assortment of better films. The source material and Stone were a lethal combination, exacerbating Stone’s penchant for pretentiousness rather than tempering it. Not unlike Tony Scott’s Domino, its abundance of style comes off as unnaturally frantic, not only artistically hollow, but secondarily intended to distract audiences from the fact that the story is so brutally unoriginal. The dialogue, especially the voiceover narration, is eyeroll-inducing, painfully amateurish. Two successful marijuana moguls – best friends who share a girlfriend (who happens to be the narrator) – run afoul of a Mexican drug cartel, which leads to all manner of mayhem, gunfire, black comedy, torture and explosions before we’re done. It’s extremely unpleasant, culminating in a ludicrous finale that rewinds and presents an alternate ending; (the kind of which is normally confined to the bonus features on a disc). Cleverness overload? Or a case of an aimless, visionless production unable to know how it should end and therefore tries to get away with two endings? I suspect the latter. The only thing moderately interesting or provocative is the idea of the three leads being in a polyamorous relationship, but that’s not enough to paper over the film’s numerous failings.
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