Savages

Sick Boy's unifying theory of life - 'First you have it, then you lose it and it's gone forever. All walks of life.' - applies to Oliver Stone too. If you were in any doubt about Oliver Stone lacking the punch he once had, then let Savages put the matter to rest. This isn't an 'Oliver Stone movie'; it could have been made by anyone.

Blake Lively's voiceover sets the scene. She’s quick to stress that although she's telling us the story, it doesn't mean she survived. She's a surfer girl in love with cold Iraq Vet Kitsch and sensitive sort Taylor-Johnson who head up a cannabis-growing business based in Laguna Beach. Said business soon draws the attention of Salma Hayek's ruthless Mexican cartel; she needs the boys' contacts to make inroads across the border. However, when they tell the Mexicans they are shutting down operations, the cartel kidnap Lively and force the boys into a three-year drug contract. Of course Kitsch and Taylor-Johnson don't take this lying down, and with the help of John Travolta's DEA agent, they set about destroying the cartel..

Like Carlos and Che before it, Savages would have been best served as a mini-series. The ups and downs, peaks and troughs that we expect from a well-structured movie are out of place. It just ambles along, popping up with an emotionally distant action or torture scene once in a while, before it reaches its cop out ending. Savages is pointless; compare what this has to say about the drug business to his script for Scarface.

The casting is all wrong. Not in a million years is Taylor Kitsch a mean-spirited psychotic Iraq War veteran and while Taylor-Johnson's California college-boy-turned-beach-bum fares a little better, there’s just no personality coming from the characters. The menage a trois is creepy and the third point on the love triangle, Lively, is lumbered with an uninspired narration that she duly delivers without passion or believability. The delivery might be all her fault but she's hardly blessed with some of these lines. Through the many drafts it took to bring this to the big screen, writers Stone, Don Winslow (whose novel this is adapted from) and Shane Salerno (AVPR) all thought the following sentence was a good one: 'I would have orgasms, (he) would have wargasms.' How can you say that line without sounding ridiculous?

With Hayek in soap opera territory and an over the top Travolta flashing that manic gri,n it's left to Del Toro to keep Savages' heart beating. Although difficult to understand at times, the threat of his psychotic henchman keeps things ticking over. However, giving a crap about how it all turns out for him, or anyone else, is hard work.

If he hadn't lost it after Alexander - maybe he was surprised at the pummelling it received – he certainly has now. The once great Stone is a shadow of his former self. Sorry, Oliver, but it certainly is a phenomenon in all walks of life.