Savages Review

• 16th Sep 2012

Don’t watch this film. Don’t go to the cinema to see it, don’t rent it on DVD and if you come across if while channel hopping one day years from now – keep on hopping. I’ve never been in a screening where everyone was just so angry by how bad a film was.

The film starts of with Blake Lively’s annoying (this word is going to pop up a lot) faux sexy narration over the top, in a weird contemplative I’m-so-deep voice. She stars as Ophelia who’s in a relationship with two best friends. But it’s all good; a communal hippy love thing. With the Berkeley weed-inventing one she has orgasms and with the returning soldier she has ‘wargasms’. That’s a quote from the film. And believe it or not, the script actually gets so much worse than that.

The two friends have created the worlds greatest weed and those pesky Mexicans want to take it away from them. The idea that they use their drug running and money laundering profits to help little brown children around the world is so dumb, it’s offensive (I’ll be using that word a lot too). You know what, explaining the plot is pointless as its utter rubbish. It’s so contrived and filled with the most annoying people you have ever seen on screen; why-oh-why would you include a banker who’s such an ask-no-questions lowlife that even an investment bank doesn’t want him? Have you looked out of the window, Oliver Stone? Do you realise that the world is not keen on bankers at the moment, even if they do ride a bike? Every single one of the young perky Laguna Beach residents involved in selling the weed are such useless members of society that I would fund the Mexicans myself.

Salma Hayek plays the Mexican drug cartel boss and in one scene with Lively, she interrupts her and asks – ‘do all Americans talk like this?’. That’s what you’ve done Oliver Stone – people around the world will be asking the same question.

The most bizarre thing about this film is Travolta, Hayek and Benicio who genuinely think and act like they are in a drugs romp, which I can kind of get on board with. But the three ‘leads’ Lively, Johnson (what was he thinking?) and Kitsch are playing it straight and their performances are beyond weak in this film.

A film so bad, it’s actually offensive. And I went to see it out of my own free will, which means you made me offend myself.  How am I supposed to live with that? I thought I’d conclude my rant/review with some actual quotes from cine-goers as they left the screening:

“Oh my God, that was horrendous.”

“I want to punch someone.”

“Everyone looks like they just stepped in some s**t”

These are real quotes people, you have been warned.

Maliha Basak