Savages by Winslow, Salerno & Stone

I am continuing my survey of the films of Oliver Stone, but this week I'm veering away from his Vietnam trilogy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth) to discuss Savages, a more recent thriller.

Released in 2012, it's based on a novel by Don Winslow, who is a master of the thriller form. I discussed Winslow's novel, which is excellent, here, where I describe Stone's film of the book as "flawed but impressive."

Well, on a second viewing, I'm more impressed than ever but the flaw hasn't vanished...

Savages was adapted to the screen by Winslow himself with Oliver Stone, and Shane Salerno. (Salerno and Don Winslow had previously co-created the TV series UC: Undercover.)

It is the story of two young California cannabis entrepreneurs — pre-legalisation. 

Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a genius hippie botanist. His good buddy Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is a former special forces vet.

(Oliver Stone makes the interesting point that their characters correspond to Elias and Barnes in Platoon.)

Ben and Chon are involved in a triangular relationship with Ophelia, known as 'O' (Blake Lively).

The story begins when a Mexican drugs cartel moves in to buy a controlling stake in their dope growing operation.

When Ben and Chon refuse to sell, the cartel kidnaps Ophelia to apply pressure to them.

From that point on you can pretty much imagine what happens...

Following the example of Simon Moore's Traffik, the cartel is run by a woman, the slinky Elena (Salma Hayek), because her husband is indisposed. (In this case, dead.)

(Oliver Stone would probably dispute that Traffik was the inspiration for Hayak's character: "Women have always been involved in the drug trade... There have been some notorious female drug lords, just as there were notorious female pirates."*)

Elena's enforcer north of the border is the ferocious and frightening Lado (Benicio Del Toro).

And John Travolta plays Dennis, a corrupt FBI man working for Ben and Chon (and, it turns out, also the cartels).

This cast is exemplary, except...

Except in the case of Ophelia. O is the lynchpin of this story. She drives the plot, motivating Ben and Chon to great extremities to get her back.

And I do mean extremities. Ben is a Buddhist pacifist, but he is willing to burn a man alive to reclaim O.

Which means the movie is in trouble if the viewer doesn't believe the guys would care this much about O, or that she is worth it.

Well, the movie is in trouble...

None of which is to diss Blake Lively. I thought she was terrific in The Shallows (2016) and utterly magnificent in a very difficult and demanding role in The Rhythm Section (2020).

So I was wondering if she was simply miscast in Savages or whether her character just wasn't sufficiently well written. 

But when you learn that she was a last minute replacement for Jennifer Lawrence, who left Savages to star in Hunger Games, things begin to fall into place.

Jennifer Lawrence would have been vastly more believable as the catalyst for the hellish chaos that ensues. 

But even so, the underwritten part of O in the script doesn't help....

In any case, I never bought that the character was worth all the fuss triggered by her abduction. And I suspect that audiences all over the world felt the same.

Setting that aside — and it is a big ask to set it aside — Savages is a superlatively well crafted thriller.

And, unlike the novel, it has a happy ending. And I always like a happy ending.

(*The Oliver Stone quotes are from this superb book which is my motivation for the Stone retrospective.)

(Images credits: all from IMDB.)