REVIEW: Savages

Savages (2012): Dir. Oliver Stone. Written by: Shane Salerno, Don Winslow and Oliver Stone. Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, John Travolta, Benicio del Toro, Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir. Rated R (Brutal and bloody violence, cursing in English and Spanish, and a dash of sex and drugs). Running time: 131 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

Lado Arroyo, played with vicious intensity by Benicio del Toro, prowls around like a rabid animal in Savages, Oliver Stone’s searing new thriller about the intersections between a Mexican drug cartel and the marijuana business in Southern California.

An enforcer for an infamous crime lord (Salma Hayek), Lado is an electrical rod, giving the film a jolt of energy whenever it starts to falter. Mr. del Toro’s performance might even embody the movie’s wild, multifaceted personality in miniature. Lado is brutally violent and misogynistic, and Benicio del Toro plays him with a cavalier demeanor that could be cold and calculating. Or it could be the menacing quiet of an absolute psychopath. When he interrogates people and gives them his calm, leering stare, it is hard to tell whether he has a plan or is making it up as he goes along.

The same may be said of director Oliver Stone, who also shares writing credit here with Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (who wrote the novel from which this film has been adapted). There are moments when Savages comes just shy of the grandeur of Martin Scorsese’s mob movies. But even the most frenetically stylized work from Scorsese bears an unmistakable mark of the director’s command over his material. Oliver Stone’s style is looser, relying on handheld cameras and quick editing. It can create an intoxicating effect but has its limitations too. Certain sequences in Savages have a woozy power but just as often the film feels as though it could spiral out of control.

Through the narration of a Laguna surfer girl named Ophelia (Blake Lively), we are introduced to Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch), who run a highly profitable business growing and selling the best weed in the world. Ben is the brains of the operation, though he would probably prefer to be called the spirit and soul of it. He is a longhaired and peace-loving young man, a Buddhist who has just returned from a humanitarian trip in Indonesia.

Chon, on the other hand, is the muscle of the business. An ex-Navy SEAL, he does the dirty work for his best pal – the usual busting down doors and collecting owed money from clients – and he carries with him a fair amount of mental baggage from the war.

Ophelia (“O,” as she goes by) has given her heart to both men, and all three seem pretty happy about that arrangement. She spends some nights with Ben, others with Chon and, on at least one stoned evening, both at once.

But their blissful paradise – an impressive villa overlooking the beach – can only last so long. A representative from the aforementioned Mexican drug cartel (Demián Bichir) visits them (having first sent a rather intimidating video of decapitated heads). He explains that his boss would like to go into business with them. Ben and Chon will teach the cartel’s workers the secrets of the trade and over the course of several years, then they will hand over the business entirely for a considerable payout. The deal is really more of a command though; Ben and Chon have little choice in the matter.

Things get complicated, however, as situations like this often do. There are kidnappings and ransoms, heated negotiations, infighting among the cartel, and a DEA agent (John Travolta) who has his hands in just about every piece of the pie imaginable. Whipping it all together in a frenzy that occasionally flirts with incoherence, Oliver Stone delivers an exhilarating genre picture that only touches peripherally on political issues that are often at the forefront of his movies.

The film also has a wicked sense of humor and a willingness to poke fun at itself. When a character says the movie’s title once, it’s tacky. When three different characters say the title over the course of the movie, the filmmakers are clearly having fun.

But Savages never quite finds its footing; it’s too busy running headlong into its next crazy idea. Portions of the movie are so frantic and energized that when the movie does slow down, we start to lose interest.

Still, Savages has plenty of good scenes and a handful of great ones that redeem its shortcomings. Not the least of these come from a superb cast. Benicio del Toro is a compulsively watchable force, as is Salma Hayek as Elena Sánchez, the woman pulling all the strings. In one of the best scenes, she unleashes a bilingual tirade on a few of her henchmen, swearing only in subtitled Spanish. Ms. Hayek balances the over-the-top with the understated, revealing occasional glimmers of tenderness in the fiery cartel boss.

John Travolta reminds audiences what a commanding presence he has, going toe to toe with Benicio del Toro in one crackling scene, another highlight of the film. With so much scene-stealing talent it would be easy to miss strong work from the three young leads. The best of them may be Taylor Kitsch, who pretty much only has one gear, angry, but he makes it compelling.

The ending, unfortunately, is a letdown. At first it seems lazy, then it tries to do too much and ultimately peters out with a trite voiceover from Blake Lively. (When a movie has a character reciting a Webster’s definition of the title, it’s a sign the filmmakers don’t know how to end it.) But this only briefly dampens the impact of the movie’s audacious heights, which burn on in spite of its flaws.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/12

Kick-Ass and the Future of Superhero Movies

Superhero movies have been so popular in the last decade it’s almost difficult to imagine what our summer blockbusters were about before they seemingly all became about caped crusaders. There were, of course, hits made from superheroes before 2000 – Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) were both huge – but it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) along with Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002) that confirmed what had already been proven by those earlier films. Superheroes are ingrained deep enough into our pop culture consciousness that even the so-so ones have a decent shot at scoring a profit in their big screen adventures.
 

In 2010, superhero films are still going strong, but for how much longer? When will a lot become too many? Are superheroes headed for overexposure? Next summer, there will be three big ones. Thor comes out in May, followed closely by Captain America: The First Avenger in July, and sandwiched in between them will be Green Lantern in June. Thor and Captain America will both set up characters for the super-sized Marvel crossover, The Avengers, to be released the following summer. All of the aforementioned films will be released in 3D, which means studios anticipate audience members spending up to $45 on superheroes at the cinema next summer, not counting repeat viewings.
 

And those are just the summer offerings. There will be The Green Hornet in January and an X-Men prequel titled, X-Men: First Class to be released sometime in 2011. In the following year, there will be Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman movie, as well as a Spiderman reboot from Mark Webb, the director of (500) Days of Summer.

With all these movies still before us and many more behind us, it’s no wonder there have been some less conventional takes on the superhero genre. I’m tempted to label them “post-superhero” movies if it weren’t for the fact that they don’t offer much that’s truly contrary to the more traditional superhero tales.

The long-awaited adaptation of Alan Moore’s cult classic Watchmen (2009) had potential to give us something new, but under 300 helmer Zach Snyder’s direction, the film was underwhelming and confirmed many fans’ suspicions that the book was unfilmable.

The ads for Hancock (2008), an original story, suggested that Will Smith’s title character would be a change-of-pace from the typical, morally upstanding heroes. A film portraying a superhero as a drunk suffering from a poor public image was intriguing, but a sloppy script gave the film a muddled tone. As it turned out, even this supposedly tongue-in-cheek superhero movie succumbed to having a big-budget action finale.

Then there’s Kick-Ass, which I missed when it came out earlier this year but recently had the opportunity to watch on DVD. Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn (who also directed the excellent pre-Bond Daniel Craig vehicle, Layer Cake) and based on a graphic novel that creator Mark Millar always intended to become a movie.

Kick-Ass begins as a satirical take on the genre, introducing Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) as a high-school nobody obsessed with comic books. He wonders why anybody hasn’t tried to be a real-life superhero yet and wants to be the first. He dismisses the way comics always give Joe Shmoe superpowers as a result of some freak accident, or how Bruce Wayne is able to afford all that cool equipment that doesn’t exist in reality. So he takes a DIY attitude to crime fighting, buys a wet suit and some nunchucks online and practices badass one-liners in the mirror. Like a true teenager, he calls himself Kick-Ass.

These scenes are wonderful as are the high school scenes, which take more than a few cues from Superbad (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a.k.a. McLovin, is even here as the son of a wealthy mobster). There’s some funny stuff about how Dave unwittingly becomes the pseudo-gay friend of the girl he has a crush on, and some smart jokes about what a society populated with superheroes would really be like in the age of camera phones and online social networking. When Dave’s first successful scuffle with a couple of street thugs becomes a YouTube sensation, he wastes no time in creating a MySpace page for his alter ego and revels in the glory of the friend requests that come pouring in.

But Kick-Ass quickly breaks its own rules. After getting struck by a car, most of Dave’s bones are replaced with metal, and a lack of nerve endings allows him to get punched without feeling a thing. Maybe this twist is part of the film’s self-awareness and there’s a bit of irony in the fact that this miracle occurs after an embarrassing first attempt at heroism, but mostly it just takes the wind out of a clever premise. Then there is Damon Macready (Nicholas Cage) who goes by the alias Big Daddy and his daughter Mindy a.k.a. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz). Much like Bruce Wayne, whom the film pokes fun at earlier, Macready sinks countless dollars into buying heavy artillery and trains his daughter in martial arts. Early in the film, there’s a joke that mocks the way superheroes are always given cheesy motives of vengeance, but Kick-Ass doesn’t hesitate to turn around a few scenes later and give Macready just that. He seeks to avenge the death of his wife, for which he blames the mobster, Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Hit Girl is another source of problems for the film. I realize, yes, that the character is supposed to be provocative and controversial, but she’s all shock. Her father has trained her to be the perfect killer, which explains the violence, but why all the vulgarity? Macready notably avoids such language in her presence, giving her cutesy pet names even while he trains her to take bullets as she wears a Kevlar vest. That scene gets some laughs because of the disparity between Macready’s words and actions. Wouldn’t Hit Girl have been funnier if amidst all the carnage she paused every once in while and acted like the little girl she is? Then there might have been a dash of irony added to a character whose actions are just gratuitous. We watch as Hit Girl pumps lead into bad guy’s heads and slashes them up with knives bigger than she is, and the film expects us to laugh simply because it’s a little girl doing all this.

The performances are mostly good. Aaron Johnson brings the right mix of everyman qualities and teen perviness to the role, Nicholas Cage strikes a balance between understatement as the father and pure camp when he dons his mask, and Chloë Grace Moretz, for what it’s worth, has a lot of onscreen charisma.

Still, once we reach the blood-splattered finale, the movie is no different than the superhero films it parodies in the earlier scenes. Everyday characters achieve great physical feats in the name of awesome fight choreography and a complex plot is resolved with simple action. The movie wants to have its cake and blow it up too.

Kick-Ass was relatively cheap to make and did well enough at the box office to spawn a forthcoming sequel in graphic novel and movie form, but are movies like this the future of superheroes? I’m still waiting for someone to make a true anti-superhero movie, one that really skewers the conventions of the genre and commits to its satire.

In the mean time, there is a host of traditional superheroes lining up to receive our money in the form of ticket sales. My prediction though? After The Avengers and the third Batman movie come out in 2012, the Golden Age of superhero movies will end. They’ll still exist for sure, but will no longer be dependable megahits for studios. That day will be a bittersweet one. Fresh, new stories will hopefully find their way to multiplexes, and our favorite costumed heroes and heroines will return to the pages from whence they came. Before that happens, movies like Kick-Ass will no doubt try to change the direction of the tide, but will effectively only push us further into a superhero overload.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/19/10