Oliver Stone's Lurid, Incredibly Racist 2012 Crime Melodrama Savages Fucking Sucks
Aw yeah! They’re smoking that sweet, sweet cheetah!
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’m not sure there is a universe where I would enjoy Savages, Oliver Stone’s lurid, decidedly un-mellow 2012 bummer of pot melodrama. I’m deep into a patron-funded exploration of Stone’s filmography and while I have enjoyed and respected some of the films I have encountered during this journey, it has only strengthened my intense dislike of Stone and his movies.
But Savages particularly suffered from being the first movie I saw after Quentin Tarantino’s famously brutal western 2015 The Hateful Eight because it resembles Tarantino’s epic exercise in verbose misanthropy enough to suffer terribly by comparison.
For better but almost invariably for worse, Savages is Stone’s The Hateful Eight: a lengthy, pitch-black wallow in the depths of human degradation filled with violence and bad behavior and some of the worst people in the world treating each other with gleeful brutality.
Both The Hateful Eight and Savages make the bold if perhaps foolish and counter-productive choice to have no likable or sympathetic characters, only absolute monsters and scoundrels who are only slightly less awful.
But because Savages is a late-period Oliver Stone movie from a fading auteur desperate to prove he still has it, it has none of the redeeming qualities of Tarantino’s work with the notable exception of a fine performance by a comeback-hungry John Travolta cast brazenly against type.
looking not good, John my man!
The good news is that Savages features Travolta in a rare, inspired character actor turn as a scuzzy, gleefully corrupt, unmistakably balding DEA agent with a dad bod and normcore wardrobe.
The bad news is that Travolta’s winningly goofy turn is the film’s only redeeming facet and he’s only in the movie for about twenty minutes.
The true stars of Savages, unfortunately, are Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whose performances here illustrate why they may be actors but they damn sure aren’t movie stars.
They’re ostensibly complete opposites who find common ground in friendship, a thriving marijuana business and a shared lover, girlfriend and soulmate but they deliver weirdly identical performance.
Taylor Kitsch strikes out on the big screen yet again as John "Chon" McAllister Jr, a decorated veteran with ice in his veins and a single-minded dedication to growing the finest marijuana on God’s green earth and making his relationship with ravishing and deeply stupid beach bunny Ophelia “O” Sage (Blake Lively) work despite considerable obstacles.
Lively is famously one of the most beautiful women in the world but her Manic Pixie Dream Girl on Valium routine here makes her borderline unbearable. It does not help that she delivers, in a valley girl whine, narration so terrible it made me first hurl tomatoes at my television and then shoot it in anger and disgust, Elvis-style.
O says of Chon, “He’s always trying to fuck the war out of himself.” She has orgasms, whereas her bloody-minded beau has “wargasms.”
Wargasms! Is this a Neo-Noir from an Oscar-winning auteur or open mic night spoken word poetry? O says of her namesake, “I was named after the bipolar basket case in Hamlet who commits suicide” and reflects of her boyfriends’ trade, “Dope’s supposed to be bad but in a bad world it’s good” so the answer is yes, this definitely is a bad poetry slam in film form.
Stone and co-writers Don Winslow (who wrote the novel the film is based on) and Shane Salerno, who will answer on judgment day for the unforgivable creative crime that is the documentary Salinger aren’t just writing pulpy dialogue that tries way too hard and NEVER succeeds, they’re indulging in word jazz, man! They’re laying down heavy jive for all you cool cats and sexy ladies.
Can you dig it? I knew you could.
Soggy slice of white-bread Aaron Taylor-Johnson is Ben, a theoretically cerebral, countercultural bohemian who wants to heal the earth and save the babies in Africa but who instead comes off like a jock/jar-head’s fuzzy, unconvincing conception of a hippie.
Ben, Chon and O are living the sweet life in Laguna Beach as impossibly beautiful, rich outlaws in a sexy throuple the movie seems scandalized and turned on by.
Stone, alas, is not a sensualist so he has made a movie about sexy people sexing it up in paradise that is not remotely sexy. He’s made a movie about two hot dudes having sex with the same hot girl, sometime at the same time, while fucked up on Mary Jane that is also somehow not particularly homoerotic either.
What Savages is, however, is incredibly racist! Even by Stone’s exceedingly lenient standards, the film is appalling and shameless in its depiction of brown people as bloodthirsty monsters.
Savages is even more racist than its title suggests. Both members of the Mexican cartel and our heroes are referred to as savages but the film’s message seems to be that the Mexican cartel is so cartoonishly vicious and psychotic that their Satanic evil pushes gorgeous white people into murder, armed robbery and various other forms of brutality.
The best friends’ world-class ganja leads the Mexican cartel to want to do business with them. When they express reservations, Elena "La Reina" Sánchez (Salma Hayek, oozing one-dimensional evil) decides to hit the boys where it hurts.
She has her henchmen kidnap O and threaten to chop off her head if they don’t do what they want. The beautiful flower of white femininity is menaced, harassed, terrorized and raped by Miguel "Lado" Arroyo (Benicio Del Toro), Elena’s psychotic right hand man.
Not even actors of Del Toro and Hayek’s stature can do anything with one-dimensional roles as crude caricatures of Mexicans as homicidal criminals who rape and torture and kill and think nothing of chopping off heads and arms to send a message to gringos and also just for fun.
The cartel’s sinister machinations push Ben and Chon to extremes to raise the money needed to free their mutual soulmate. Chon returns to the merciless strategies of the battlefield while Ben finds himself immersed in a seedy criminal underworld of bloodshed and brutality, rape and murder.
With the assistance of folks like Bruce Springsteen and Jeff Daniels, Winslow produced a series of anti-Donald Trump commercials. That’s ironic considering that Savages feels like a Trumpian wet dream/nightmare of anti-Hispanic fear-mongering.
Oliver Stone is always a class act!
Savages reflects the virulent anti-Mexican racism that led Trump to run for President so purely that he might as well show up at the end and say, “My name is Donald Trump and I approve of this film’s message.”
The only person having any goddamn fun at all is Travolta, and his character’s wife is dying of Cancer. It’s novel and refreshing seeing Travolta lustily assume a scene-stealing supporting role and his goofy banter is a welcome respite from the unrelenting grimness of the rest of the film.
Travolta seems to be in a different movie than everyone else, a movie with qualities such as “humor” and “personality.”
Savages should have opened up a new world to Travolta as a character actor. Instead it seems to have done nothing for his career.
Savages is an out of touch old man’s deluded and wholly unsuccessful attempt to make a young movie. It’s exhausting when it tries to be exciting and, in time-honored Oliver Stone tradition, utterly full of it and devoid of fun.
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
PLUS, for a limited time only, get a FREE copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al, Felipe Sobreiro and my “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring. book when you buy any other book in the Happy Place store! That’s a 10.50 value for free!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!