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

REVIEW: Green Lantern

Green Lantern (2011): Dir. Martin Campbell. Screenplay by: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Story by: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim. Based on the comics by: John Broome and Gil Kane. Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard and Mark Strong. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action). Running time: 114 minutes.

1 star (out of four)

Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) has the power to create anything he wants to fight his enemies with. Let that sink in for a moment. Anything. When called upon to use this power, he creates a chainsaw, a machine gun, a really big fist. If you were given the ability to create anything at all out of nothing, wouldn’t you feel obligated to be a little more creative than that?

Green Lantern is an uninspired bore; its script seems to have been written by someone who saw Spider-Man once and was asked to copy the structure of its superhero origin story from memory. Hal Jordan, a cocky Air Force pilot, is the unlikely recipient of a green ring that bears with it great responsibility. Jordan has been chosen by the ring’s magical powers to become a Green Lantern – a Guardian of the Universe – and we all know that you can’t argue with a magic ring’s decision.

In many recent superhero movies, there has been a touch of much-needed self-awareness. Audiences cannot be expected to sit through film after film of increasingly silly heroes without those films acknowledging that maybe these stories are a little silly. There are moments when Green Lantern tries this but more often these scenes come across as lazy writing. When Jordan is given the ring by an alien who crash-lands on Earth, he immediately calls his friend to the crash site and the following exchange occurs:

“Is that a spaceship?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it real?”

“Yeah.”

There is no sense of wonder or excitement in Green Lantern, just the obligatory motions of a story that is being told… Why? To ensure that the ever-profitable mines of superhero lore have been thoroughly exhausted?

After receiving the ring, Jordan travels to the planet Oa where he meets the thousands of other Lanterns whose appearances range from fishy humanoids to burly trolls. Their leader, Sinestro (Mark Strong) looks almost completely human except that he has reddish purple skin, pointy ears and even pointier eyebrows. The Lanterns are currently plagued by the evil Parallax, a former Guardian of the Universe turned giant cloudy beast. He seeks to destroy Oa using the yellow power of Fear (as opposed to the green power of Will) but for reasons I have forgotten, must first devour Earth. This is where Jordan comes in.

There is another villain back on Earth named Dr. Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard wearing a spectacular receding hairline and moustache), a science professor who is given the opportunity to study the body of the alien who crashed on Earth. Unbeknownst to him (but knownst to us), he is exposed to a trace of Parallax’s yellow DNA and its evil powers soon overcome him.

Dr. Hammond is a sorry excuse for a villain. The DNA of Parallax allows him unspeakable powers but he wastes them in a pathetic fit of jealousy over Jordan’s love interest, the improbably beautiful Air Force pilot Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). Dr. Hammond is so absorbed by his crush on Ferris that he is oblivious to Parallax’s plan for world devouring. Neither he nor Jordan have much of an understanding of what is going on and neither can think of anything better to do with their cool, new powers but use them against one another in a handful of dull, insipid fight scenes.

With the exception of the ghastly Parallax, the special effects in Green Lantern have a cartoonish silliness that might have been better suited to a children’s film. Come to think of it, Green Lantern on a whole might have been better off as a kids’ movie. The story’s simplicity might have been charming in a low-stakes PG outing but when blown-up to blockbuster proportions, one can only think about how little one cares about any of the characters onscreen.

I cannot say whether Green Lantern stays true to its comic book origins or not. I have had virtually no contact with the character or the world he is a part of prior to this movie. I do know, however, that the filmmakers behind Green Lantern could have made anything. Anything at all. And this is what they chose.

- Steven Avigliano, 6/29/11

REVIEW: The Town

The Town (2010): Dir. Ben Affleck. Written by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based off the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper. Rated R (strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use). Running time: 123 minutes

2 stars (out of four)

There is a conversation in The Town where Doug MacRay (played by Ben Affleck, who also co-writes and directs the film) tells the beautiful bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) everything he knows about police investigations. As the leader of a highly successful team of bank robbers, he knows a good deal. When Claire questions how he became such an expert, he’s quick to respond – he just watches a lot of CSI, he says. That line, which gets a laugh and is one of the film’s few authentic moments, suggests that director Affleck is at least aware of the crime genre’s recent ubiquity in TV and film. Strange, then, that he would willingly throw his film into that exhaustive sea of material without offering anything new. The Town makes an effort to be a lot of different things – a heist film, a redemption story, a straight-up action flick, The Departed – but never develops its ideas enough and ends up a rather underwhelming affair.

The titular town is Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston the opening text informs us is home to more bank robbers than anywhere else in the country. The film opens with one of those robbers, MacRay, about to embark on his latest job. With him is his childhood friend Jem (The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner) and two more buddies of theirs who are more or less interchangeable and forgettable throughout the film. The job is a familiar one (for both them and us), involving rubber masks, automatic rifles and a safe. Things go as planned, but to ensure their getaway they take the aforementioned Claire hostage and dump her off blindfolded once they’ve made their getaway.

All this happens before the opening title, leaving the rest of the film to explore the aftermath of the opening heist. MacRay may be becoming interested in Claire, Jem is anxious to score again despite the threat of an FBI investigator (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) on their tail, and a local kingpin (Pete Postlethwaite) tempts the team with a dangerous job. Each of these storylines has dramatic potential, but a script full of stock characters and familiar situations keeps the film from realizing that potential.

Viewed as a heist film, The Town doesn’t involve us enough in the robberies (of which the film gives us three) and Affleck makes little effort to breathe new life into familiar scenes. The crimes themselves are of course not the film’s main focus, but the action scenes fail to raise the dramatic stakes or add anything more than a generic car chase or a shootout.

The Town would like to present itself as a story of redemption, one where our hero MacRay tries to bring himself up from circumstances beyond his control and get out of Charlestown. We never get a sense, however, that his life of crime is one that he’s been forced into. There may be socio-economic conditions forcing young men like him to rob banks but the film neglects to present them. MacRay gets even harder to sympathize with the more he becomes involved with Claire. Rebecca Hall, who was wonderful in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is wasted here playing the attractive woman who’s only allowed to react to the men of the film, never act of her own accord. Claire is lied to and manipulated, and makes some choices late in the film that are hard to believe anyone would make considering all that has happened to her.

Meanwhile, the very reasonable FBI detective Adam Frawley is trying to catch the bad guys. The film perhaps wants to paint him as the antagonist but mistakenly casts the likable Jon Hamm in the role making it unclear where our allegiance is supposed to lie. MacRay isn’t enough of an underdog to root for, Frawley isn’t mean enough to root against, and there is not enough interplay between the two to create some good cat-and-mouse tension.

As MacRay’s best friend, the trigger-happy Jem causes a lot of trouble for no reason. Jeremy Renner does fine with a one-dimensional character but following a much more complex depiction of masculinity in The Hurt Locker, the role doesn’t ask much of him. Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) steps out of her tween-film comfort zone and is strong as MacRay’s drug-addicted former flame. Rounding out the cast is Chris Cooper in a brief appearance as MacRay’s father. Cooper establishes a tenuous father-son relationship in his one, brief scene but his role here is a minor one.

The Town runs off stock characters and familiar themes, never digging deep enough to develop its ideas of family, community or the social trappings of crime. The film passes us by, going through the motions so that we forget it faster than a witness struggling to identify her attacker in a lineup.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/15/10