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Release date: July 6, 2012
Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Emile Hirsch, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Salma Hayek, Benicio Del Toro
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Premise: Pot growers Ben and Chon face off against the Mexican drug cartel who kidnapped their shared girlfriend.
we used to have TV shows that would imitate the success of movies. now we've come a full cycle.
Ha, they want this to look like a Tony Scott movie. Considering the character contrasts Stone already says he wants to focus on in the film, I doubt proponents of Scott's effect films will be happy with the results of Savages. Still, it will probably be poppier than recent Stone efforts.
OH GOD WHAT'S GOING ON WITH JOHN TRAVOLTA'S FACE???
I caught this last night. I'm very glad it was a free screening.
It's slick but wholly uninteresting... You just can't give a shit about anything that goes on in the film. It's like two nineteen year old film bros got too high and decided to make an action movie by crossing Weeds and the Transporter.
Rather than being an Oliver Stone movie made to look like a Tony Scott movie, it really should have just been a Tony Scott movie all along.
What a disaster.
Just two weeks ago I watched JFK again, I should have just rewatched. It's almost absurd to think that the same man who made that film and Nixon would make this dumb piece of shit. Problems abound.
The three leads are all idiots. You want them dead from scene 1. One is an Irak veteran who always acts pissed off and dignified despite the fact he's always baked in the best dope "in the whole world". The other is a kind of neo-hippie who is against violence and builds houses for poor kids in Africa. And the girl has no apparent talent except being a great fuck and giving the worst voice over narration in the history of cinema. She opens the film with this: "Just because I'm telling you this story, doesn't mean I'm alive at the end of it". It's horrible. Ten minutes later you're like "bitch, shut the fuck up. you're an imbecile, you don't know shit". It's like listening to a 17 year old musing about "life" and "love". Of course this could all be hilarious in the hands of the Coens or anyone else. But Stone chooses to take these guys seriously and that kills this movie. Everyone else seems to understand the potential humor in it. Benicio del Toro stands out, as John Travolta. Salma is terrible always so I guess she does what she can...All the mexicans (Demian Bichir, Joaquín Cossio, Diego Cataño) are great too in their small interventions. But with those leads you just can't give a shit about nothing. The characters are bad enough but the actors suck too. You need some weight or some true personality to deliver in these kinds of roles, and they just don't cut it.
Oliver Stone has been seriously fucking up for almost 10 years now, the only decent flick he's made is W. and it should have been a lot better than what came out. He needs to pair with Robert Richardson again soon, at least.
totally agreed, this film is a mess.
Is the book this bad?
Quote from: Alexandro on December 19, 2012, 10:22:20 AM
"Just because I'm telling you this story, doesn't mean I'm alive at the end of it"
That has got to be the fucking single worst opening line in the history of anything. Ten times worse than every Bulwer-Lytton winner. How do you open the script, read that on page one, and decide, not only to finish reading, but to actually make it -- with time and money -- into a movie?
Now, that said, is she still alive at the end? I don't know whether that makes it better or not.
semi spoil:
I can tell you that it has a ridiculous and lame ending regarding that line.
Holy hell this sucked.
Considering the low expectations, I wasn't really having a hard time watching this until the end, which is got to be one of the most ridiculous things I've seen in a movie in a long time. Talk about an arbitrary twist that turned an OK-ish movie into a cinematic insult.
Blake Lively seriously makes me cream my pants whenever I see her, though.
Quote from: ElPandaRoyal on January 02, 2013, 04:36:12 AM
Blake Lively seriously makes me cream my pants whenever I see her, though.
I actually found her extremely sexy and hot in the first few minutes and gradually lost any attraction during the movie. Her character is such an idiot and her voice over ruins the film to such an extent that death seems like the only merciful solution to her predicaments.
Yeah, the character is not that good, and the voice over is terrible, but I mostly fault the writing and directing more than her performance. She was really awesome in The Town, so the chick can act, which probably means she did what she could with such a poorly developed character, as thin as her name.
Yea, this film was horrible. It's full caricature for Stone and desperate because he's trying to make it ring true with the better elements of his filmmaking. He wants the story to be a drama of contradiction with the idea of savages in the drug trade in Mexico and outside of it in luxurious California. He also wants to contrast two parental relationships in the adopted one between Hayek and Lively with lack of one for both characters and their biological counterparts. Stone wants these two things which filtrate through and make you wonder beyond the reel length of the story, but all that drama is bullshit plot invention and bad theme references with no depth to it.
Savages feels familiar but Stone had no idea whether he wanted to take the story full pulp (U-Turn) or make it a down-to-the-detail look at a crazy environment (Salvador). The layers of plot would likely have always kept the story away from the ladder and instead of just embrace a story that could only go pulp, he tried to force feed some drama into the story.
Whoa welcome back! And I agree.