Salma Hayek is the brains in the Mexican drug gang in “Savages.”
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” seemed like something somebody thought up at 4 a.m. after ingesting enough substances to stun a camel.
With “Savages,” though, Stone lets the amoral drug-running degenerates on the screen handle the crazy for him, keeping a cool hand and a steady eye. This Elmore Leonard-style noir about lowlifes versus dirtbags is nasty, vicious fun.
Peace-loving Ben (Aaron Johnson) and steely eyed Chon (Taylor Kitsch) grow some of the best weed in California, if not the world. So a Mexican drug gang (muscle: Benicio Del Toro, brains: Salma Hayek) offers to fold the boys’ “indie” business into the Baja cartel’s global concern. Ben and Chon can even keep 80 percent of the take. Moreover, they enjoy the continuing support of a bought-and-paid-for DEA agent (John Travolta). Travolta’s doughy, cheerfully corrupt lawman is the most adorable sleaze in the picture.
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Ben and Chon do exactly what you or I would do when given a generous offer by men who buy machine-gun rounds by the shipload: refuse, and prepare to flee the country. But first, though, they tell their shared lover (Blake Lively) that they’ll all live happily in Indonesia. This, um, joint girlfriend remarks that the situation is akin to the point in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” when the bandits take their lady friend to Bolivia. Didn’t they die in the end? “Well, not the girl!” she remembers.
Because she needs one last stroll through the mall to stock up on Manolos, the little blond princess is captured, thrown in a dungeon and held without even a subscription to InStyle. The girl subjects her captors to nonstop weapons-grade whining about how she deserves “maybe a clean room at least, maybe a salad once in a while.” And how are her jailers supposed to get any sleep with her phosphorescent teeth glowing all night like a supernova?
The boys, because brainless size-0 blondes are so scarce in the state of California, scheme to get her back. Their next great idea is to make war on the gang, shoot its desperadoes, steal its money and use it to buy back the girl.
Let’s hear it for boyish exuberance. Chon does have a few tricks, though: He’s a veteran of the Iraq war, where he learned how to build I.E.D.’s and say things like “Go Sunni on these bastards,” and “May Allah be with you.” (Wait, which side did he fight on in Iraq?)
Though not quite up to the Leonard standard, the tough-guy chatter is a delight, as meaty and pulpy and pungent as a slab of beef that’s been left out in the sun.
Often the ruthlessness is wry, even funny. “Bury them like men — what’s left of them,” says Del Toro, extra frightening with a molded poof of hair that makes him look like an alcoholic country-western singer in 1978. He tells an assistant henchman, in the last words the unfortunate underling will ever hear, “It didn’t work out. You’re too sensitive” and remarks to another guy, “A man takes care of his family, I respect that” while dousing him with gasoline and putting a tire around his chest. Still, on some odd occasions the writing sounds like Carrie Bradshaw. (On sex with a soldier: “I have orgasms, he has war-gasms.” If one friend is a Buddhist, the other is “a bad-ist.”)
A lifetime ago, Stone wrote “Scarface,” whose extravagance bordered on camp, but, despite its excesses, “Savages” is never unintentionally funny, just gritty and mean. The run time is more than two hours, yet it’s also tight: no drag, no waste, no message.