Savages (2012)

Have you ever watched a movie and then thought “how did this get made?”
First: I’m sure I’ve posed that question on other 1-Claw reviews before.
Second: Seriously. How? I’m aware that when filming, scenes are shot out of order, so no one on set is completely aware of exactly what’s happening at any given moment, but someone somewhere at some point had to read a script of the movie that was being made, and an exec had to approve the movie to actually get released to theaters (or streaming) once post-production was complete, which means at least two people who aren’t the director have to give the thumbs up to any and every steaming pile of garbage that makes it to the silver screen.
And then I ask: who are these people?! Why are they getting paid to give the thumbs up to trash!

I should probably explain why this movie is so bad, right?
Okay.
Here goes.

“Savages” (2012) started with an opening monologue from Ophelia (Blake Lively), who immediately stated that she might not make it to the end of the movie, just like Dave did in “Kick Ass” (2010).
“Savages” starred Aaron Taylor-Johnson, like “Kick Ass”
There were unnecessarily bloody and violent fight scenes, like in “Kick Ass.”
And when there were emotional scenes before and after the violent fight scenes, there was haunting choral music, just like “Kick Ass.”
It’s pretty clear to me that director Oliver Stone was jealous of director Mark Millar’s 2010 success story and wanted to capture the same energy and magic; not only did he shit the bed and fail to do so, but he aggressively rolled around in it to get the sheets nice and gross before misspelling his own name on the headboard.

“Kick Ass” is hands-down one of my favorite movies – it’s certainly not for everyone, and that’s fine. I wouldn’t even give it a 5-Claw rating based on my own criteria, but it’s still an outstanding story and I’ve watched it countless times, so the fact that this greasy stain aped one of my favorites so hard is difficult to overlook.
It’s like how both “Maleficent” (2014) and “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” (2019) mooched off of “StarDust” (2007) in painfully obvious and unapologetic ways.

Sorry, lemme try to actually talk about the movie.

So the intro was monologued by Ophelia; in fact, the entire movie was narrated by Ophelia, often to the point where it went from simply narrating to hard-core expositing.
Running monologues can actually be pretty good, as I pointed out with “Lord of War” (2005); the problem with Ophelia was that her narration constantly felt like she was about to take a hard right turn and talk about her spirit animal or her zodiac sign or something equally ridiculous. I can’t pinpoint a single example – it was just a weird vibe I got any time she was bloviating.
During her opener, Ophelia described her two lovers, Chon (Taylor Kitsch) – an Army veteran who went on one-too-many deployments to Afghanistan, and Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who was a super laid-back dude who just wanted to help starving kids in Africa.
The three of them made the most conventionally attractive thruple you ever did see, with no one getting jealous of anyone else or using any form of protection in the constant scenes of any two (and sometimes all three) of them having sex.
Ben and Chon together owned the best marijuana business in all of California, pre-legalization, so they had to deal with crooked FBI agent Dennis (John Travolta) taking a cut in exchange for keeping the agency off their tail.

Then, spontaneously, a Mexican drug cartel decapitated a bunch of people, filmed themselves punting the heads around a room, and emailed it to Chon as some kind of warning about encroaching on their turf.
Shortly thereafter, a representative from the cartel met with Ben and Chon (B&C) to discuss hiring them as advisors and buying out their weed mini-empire for a very generous sum of money.
Remember: this was pre-legalization (recreational legalization in California came in 2016), so it’s not like B&C were in the clear and were about to be forcibly pulled into an illegal space, they were just in a slightly less illegal realm by selling weed themselves, instead of selling weed as part of a cartel.
The two turned down the offer, which pissed off the leader, Elena (Salma Hayek), who insisted on wearing very unsettling brown contact lenses that made her look like an anime character whenever the camera was zoomed in on her face.

Elena’s response was to threaten B&C with murder, to which B&C reacted to smartly by trying to plan a low-profile escape from the U.S., including fake IDs and spoofed SIM cards to cover their tracks, as coded by their inexplicably talented tech crew. Ophelia narrated an introduction for all of those character, of course, but I don’t remember who they were nor did I care, as their collective existence lent approximately zero value to the movie.

While B&C were making carefully planned out and measured steps to get themselves and Ophelia out of the country, Ophelia decided the thing that she desperately needed to do was some retail therapy, despite being told that she couldn’t take anything besides the shirt on her back.
Elena’s men struck and kidnapped Ophelia, because she had the situational awareness of a dead squirrel, even after being told that she and B&C were now top-of-the-list cartel targets.
Ophelia was held captive in a cage somewhere by Lado (Benicio Del Toro), who was mostly shown to just be Elena’s right-hand man. Not exactly a moral character, but good at doing what he was told… right up until we found out he was crossing Elena to work for El Azul (Joaquin Cosio), presumably to do the exact same job.

There was crossing and double crossing and snitching and secrets and a money heist as the conflict between Elena and B&C increased.
There was a ridiculous shootout scene between B&C and their crew of snipers – again, introduced by narration by Ophelia, whose names and presence I didn’t care about – and Elena’s money runners, where someone had to explain what an “I.E.D.” was to someone else (“improvised explosive device,” for the record), as “something those sand ****** use in Afghanistan,” which was a) an unnecessarily racist and vulgar way to describe the terrorist organizations there, and b) a ridiculous thing to need to explain. They could have just called it a “car bomb” or a “roadside bomb” and any audience member would have understood; there was zero reason to use the combat terminology, other than because Oliver Stone had a hard-on to play military-pretend but couldn’t get the DOD to give him action-figure rights like Michael Bay has.

Progressively more stupid things happened, including Elena offering Ophelia a nice dinner in a fancy room for some reason, and Lado showing Ophelia a video on his phone of him raping her.
It was 100% a dogshit cookie, because there was no reason that needed to be included. Yes, he was a cartel hitman and he was clearly lacking a moral compass, but nothing he’d done up to that point showed him to be that kind of cruel.
And weirdly: when Ophelia saw the clip, it was like she was seeing it for the first time – despite obviously being conscious in the video – and reacted as if he were about to leak a sex tape showing her cheating on Ben, instead of… you know… rape.
This is particularly concerning as Benicio Del Toro then went on to play another character who committed rape in “Sicario” (2015), and it’s the kind of specifically consistent thing that makes me wonder if that’s a red flag we should all be paying attention to.
Like how Morgan Freeman keeps acting in movies where his characters understand science as well as dogs grasp laparoscopic surgery.

Somewhere in there was a subplot about B&C kidnapping Elena’s daughter Magda (Sandra Echeverría) as a bargaining chip to get Ophelia back.

Throughout all of this, Ophelia made two more direct references to her not making to the end credits despite being the narrator.
Then the big fight scene happened, which went about as wrong as you can imagine, with everyone on both sides getting shot and dying. As the camera zoomed out, Ophelia added “at least, that’s what I thought was going to happen,” and the scene rewound and revealed that Dennis showed up at just the right time to catch Elena and claim B&C as his informants to bring down the cartel and no one died even slightly.

What was the point of Ophelia telling the story and repeatedly telling the audience that she was going to actually die if the ending wasn’t going to do that? It’s not even like she was mortally wounded and woke up post-surgery.
She straight-up fantasized about dying.
She fetishized the concept of being soaked in the blood of her two lovers and the three of them dying together in a shootout that never happened.
What an impossibly stupid concept.
I’m sure Oliver Stone would tell me he did it to “subvert expectations,” which is allowed, because it was his movie, but it cheapened everything about the story and made it no better than simply having Ophelia wake up having dreamt it all.

There was a completely random scene where a cartel member pretending to be a cop shot a random black dude under the guise of a speeding ticket, but that had absolutely zero value to the story; they didn’t steal the car or the man’s identity, nor was it revealed the man was a competing weed dealer. As far as I can tell, it was just a “look how bad these cartel guys are!” scene, which… unnecessary, considering the cartel’s introduction was via skull soccer.

Speaking of: whenever the cartel sent an email to B&C, their computer would play weird clown music.
It made sense the first time, because the clown music happened during the head-kicking scene, but every time after that, the emails were just text, which meant that someone had to change the settings on B&Cs’ computer to specifically play clown music when Elena’s emails came through.
This movie was made in 2012. Email and notification noises weren’t new then.

The title, “Savages,” was finally referenced during the very final scene, where Ophelia was narrating that the three of them had been placed under witness protection and were off living somewhere, “as savages,” which she supported via some “dictionary definition” that absolutely didn’t match up with the surfer-dude/boho/feed starving children lifestyle they’d clearly been moved to.

I’m not even going to comment on the special effects or music in this movie. Just assume everything was terrible, because it was.

Writing this made me almost as angry as I was while I watched it.
Seriously.
Someone had to greenlight this movie so it could be released in theaters a decade ago, and Universal Pictures lost a lot of money, which they deserved.
Do not waste your time now, even with it being free to you via Netflix.
Rub sawdust in your eyes instead – cleaning out your orbital sockets will be a better use of 131 minutes than watching this.