Savages

When the film opens with a masked figure going Henry-the-eighth on three handcuffed guys with a chainsaw, rarely do you expect a comedy. But from Oliver Stone, the director who brought us Platoon and JFK, comes Savages – a film that will definitely...

In the first few minutes of “Savages,” Blake Lively’s character, O, says via superfluous voiceover, “Dope’s supposed to be bad, but in a bad, bad world, it’s good.” In reference to military vet Chon’s (Taylor Kitsch) PTSD-driven sexual behavior...

Oliver Stone, bless ’im, still believes in red-meat cinema. The proof is in Savages, a hard-“R” crime drama that never treats the audience as juvenile. Ironically, one of the points Stone goes after with his countercultural summer movie is the fatuity...

Don Winslow's novel, SAVAGES is my HUNGER GAMES. A year ago, I breezed through this thing in about a day, and since then I've been following the development of this movie slavishly. Everything about it seemed to suggest that this would be the film to...

Taken from Don Winslow's novel, the Oliver Stone fulminator "Savages" proves that marijuana cultivation, sales and distribution are the right way to live large and menage-a-trois it through endless summer days and nights with your bromantic best pal...

Taken from Don Winslow's novel, the Oliver Stone fulminator"Savages" proves that marijuana cultivation, sales and distribution are the right way to live large and menage a trois it through endless summer days and nights with your bromantic best pal and...

Oliver Stone is back in form with “Savages,” which will be good news only to those who liked Stone’s form to begin with. Based on the acclaimed 2010 novel by Don Winslow, it’s about a pair of extremely successful southern California pot growers...

The sun, in its various hues and levels of intensity, plays an important role in Oliver Stone’s latest, “Savages.”

With "Savages", the story of two southern California pot dealers who fall into escalating episodes of violence with a Mexican drug cartel, Mr. Stone attempts to recapture the grit, gore and gravitas of his "Natural Born Killers" and "U-Turn" days.

Every generation has its new invasion of savages – so now it’s Mexico’s drug cartels. That’s what Southern California’s Laguna Beach weed barons/best buddies Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) discover when they’re presented with a...

Oliver Stone has been making films with sociopolitical commentary for so long that it's something of a surprise to see him making a lighter film like Savages. Granted, a “light” Oliver Stone movie still has explicit sex, graphic violence, and a healthy...

Savages has no such lofty aspiration, only a machete to grind with an audience gradually deserting this once-important filmmaker. Stone went soft in recent years, taking it easier than anyone expected on George W. Bush, revisiting Wall Street and...

Both Savages’ central pot-growing threesome and the Mexican drug cartel they tangle with get labeled with the titular insult of Oliver Stone’s new film, and oh, do they earn it. Kidnapping, decapitations, rape, torture—marijuana may be on the verge of...

Every film Oliver Stone has made in this century has been set in the world of finance, politics, or history. Now we come to "Savages," a vaguely sleazy pulp drama that addresses those topics obliquely but is mainly filled with the director's other...

The new film “Savages” is no exception, taking on the U.S./Mexican marijuana wars, with performances by Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Salma Hayek and John Travolta.

Savages begins with a narration from Blake Lively's O and things get off to a rocky start, with some turbulent dialogue that does little to help establish O as the most important character of the film.

Savages is a drug-fueled crime delirium that doesn't break much new ground in the genre but offers a volatile concoction of violence, heroism, and amorality that is compulsively watchable. The director is Oliver Stone, a filmmaker often associated...

Mexico's recent drug war has claimed over 50,000 lives, strained already tense border relations, and exposed huge cracks in the nation's insidiously corrupt government, which remains at the mercy of ravening cartels. In Oliver Stone's Savages, all this...

Savages is Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky, amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social, topical, or political relevance. How liberated from an agenda is this movie? It's about...

SAVAGES is laid-back California noir, with director Oliver Stone presiding over the adaptation of a crime novel by Don Winslow. It's a tale of two carefree entrepreneurs with a thriving, innovative marijuana business.

What’s that sound you hear skittering across the screen during the garish 131 minutes of Savages? Oliver Stone’s remaining marbles. His recent trilogy of movies beginning with Dubya – World Trade Center, W., Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ­– may...

Oliver Stone, like all of us, is getting older, and perhaps mellower. Outside of the opening scene - which is very violent - Stone's Savages is a sun-lit, almost rosy affair - his love letter to the joys of marijuana and California, sun, sand and surf.

Despite the film's title and the inherent violence that accompanies the drug trade, Oliver Stone manages to paint a very pretty picture in Savages. It could be described as The OC meets Breaking Bad.

Savages Stone returns to a more raucously subversive style of visually whizzy filmmaking (see Natural Born Killers) with this lively drama that shifts into an action thriller. But the whole film feels like a cop out, from the terrible narration to...

Savages, a lurid thriller about the cross-border drug trade, is Oliver Stone’s latest entry in his “Current Events” phase, following his ode to 9/11 heroism World Trade Center (2006), his Dubya-years semi-satire W. (2008), and his corporate-shark...

Very early in this film, a lot of dudes -- extras really -- get themselves liberated from their own heads via cruel Mexican drug cartel chainsawing, and that is the moment you learn that old-school Oliver Stone is back and ready to rumble.

When one of your favorite directors lets you down, it's especially disappointing when you can't defend them and don't even want to. I was already skunked this summer with Tim Burton's Dark Shadows but now Oliver Stone, a filmmaker whose work I'm...

There's a fine line between pulp and pretense with Oliver Stone. From his early directorial outing, 1981's The Hand (Michael Caine loses his appendage, but it comes back, ferociously!), to his 1991 hallucinogenic rock bio The Doors, to his hyperactive...

Oliver Stone revs up the crime thriller genre with an energetic video-nasty that keeps up with modern sensibilities regarding sex, drugs, and violence. A cozy ménage a trois is at the heart of a kidnap story that bounces between Southern California and...

Watching Oliver Stone’s past few movies, one couldn’t help wondering whether the real story was the decadence going on behind the camera. I enjoyed “Any Given Sunday,” for instance, but its unexplained use of clips from the chariot race in “Ben-Hur”...

Oliver Stone returns to his comfort zone in this blood-soaked, sex and drug-fueled ride that returns the three-time Oscar winner to territory he mined so successfully in past films from Scarface to Natural Born Killers.

Look at Oliver Stone's career from one side and you see a string of celebrated classics. Platoon. Wall Street. Born on the Fourth of July. The Doors. JFK. Natural Born Killers. Impressive. Look at his 21st century career, however...

If you've seen the documentary Cash Crop, then you know that violent Mexican drug cartels have already begun to muscle their way into the U.S. to stake a claim to their share of the lucrative Marijuana market. That eye-opening expose' suggested that...

The world of drugs has been one rife for dramatization and fictionalization with film classics like "Scarface" and Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic" setting the bar for TV shows like "Weeds" and "Breaking Bad." Let's face it, there's just something about...

There are two, maybe three, Oliver Stones: the revisionist historian who drives Washington literalists batty with such lurid re-imaginings as “JFK” and “Nixon,” the straight-ahead mainstream auteur who limns the American experience in such magisterial...

Oliver Stone hit a hot streak in the 1980s, directing Platoon, Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July. These movies attracted audiences and made statements. In the ’90s, his controversy-courting JFK and Natural Born Killers got much attention, too.

As much as any director alive, Oliver Stone understands the role of violence in world affairs. And unlike fellow action auteurs Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola, combat-veteran Stone has walked the walk, so the horror is...

Buddhist Ben isn't just the brains behind one of the most revered pot-growing operations in California. He's the hippified heart behind it as well.

The hippy dream is alive and well in Oliver Stone’s initially entertaining, ultimately exhausting, typically irreverent and disappointingly irrelevant drug-war drama. Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson are Chon and Ben, Californian entrepreneurs whose...

IF anyone should be able to craft a great, sweeping thriller around the grim realities of the drug trade then Oliver Stone would seem a prime candidate for the task.

What could have been an effective excoriation of US drug policy and a proper look at the violence inherent in the trade is wasted on a simplistic thriller that offers very little, especially given who is behind the camera. Sorry if that harshes anyone’s b

Twitchy Afghanistan war vet Chon (Taylor Kitsch), his surfer-dude best bud Ben (Aaron Johnson), and their it’s-complicated communal girlfriend O (Blake Lively) spend their time running a multi-million-dollar weed business.

Lest we forget that the Oliver Stone of ‘Natural Born Killers’ and ‘U Turn’ was the same Oliver Stone who did ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ and ‘World Trade Centre’, the pulpy side of the once disreputable director has returned with potent force...