Danger to Themselves and Others: SAVAGES

In case we needed proof that director Oliver Stone has entered a relaxed late period of his filmmaking career, here comes Savages, a leisurely thriller that’s glancingly topical, set amidst recessionary drug-war politics and Mexican cartel violence, and at once complicated and reductive. He’s not stretching to make a pointed political statement or pumping up the style of what is already a fairly lurid, violent plot. Instead, he’s luxuriating in the nastiness and complexities of the script he co-wrote with Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (from Winslow’s novel). He’s taking his time, letting characters simmer until the time is right to spring them into action, allowing the plot to throw unlikely allies together, reveal its secrets, spin its wheels, come to moments of fiery action and then back down, coast along with a mostly talented ensemble cast until falling into a satisfying shoot-‘em-up climax that throws in a last minute surprise as it rewrites itself as it goes along.

The movie, a pulpy series of noirish events unraveling under the hot Laguna Beach sun, concerns two peaceful pot-growing entrepreneurs (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) and the girl (Blake Lively) who loves them both. The steamy opening moments slowly introduce us to this tricky romantic triangle. The arrangement of relationships is open and the three of them are friendly, so it all works out. As the plot kicks into motion, the guys, on the advice of their crooked D.E.A. pal (John Travolta), are considering a substantial offer of money from a lawyer (Demián Bichir) representing a ruthless Mexican cartel that wants to hire them as a north-of-the-border supplier. When the guys make plans to skip town and turn them down, the head of the cartel (Salma Hayek) orders her head henchman (Benicio Del Toro) to kidnap the girl.

What follows is a movie of shifting alliances and jockeying for power on both sides of the border. Everyone involved wants to get out of this nasty entanglement with the best enriching scenario for themselves, but given the violent, ruthless stakes of it all, most of them will be lucky to escape with their lives. In the telling, Stone is much less interested in the specifics of the action – although he stages a thrilling mid-film sequence of literal highway robbery – than in the slow burn of mood and style. This is a thriller that doesn’t feel in a rush to get anywhere in particular. Instead, it serves up long sequences that sit with characters as they try to fight their way through the suffocating moral thicket into which they’ve tumbled headfirst in the pursuit of self-preservation and profit. It’s a movie playing with all sorts of tropes of gangster movies, and neo-noir Westerns, but it’s really all about bloody business negotiations.

The ensemble cast is up to the task with incredible faces on which to watch the negotiations, and all the other scheming and plotting, play out. Kitsch and Johnson are buddies in over their heads with squinty, low-rent Butch and Sundance charm (a duo namedropped in the film itself). Hayek has a calm face of deep anger, sadness and cold calculation, Del Toro, a brutality behind his literal mustache twirling, Travolta, a close-cropped greed that reveals itself in scenes with both sides of this mess. Lively’s character, when she's not reading overwritten narration, is a vexing dilemma, needy and terrified, willful and weak, and hard to read. She’s in a position of very little power in this scenario, but she’s desperate to find a way out nonetheless and works very hard to hide this desperation as she gets close to the one who holds her captive. It’s a tangle of emotional and business connections.

Though Stone spikes the narrative with shots that slowly fade to black and white or flash into various lenses and filters, this isn’t a chaotic stylistic experiment. This is a thriller of straightforward moodiness, a slow-building tension that watches its characters as they twist under pressure, desperate to find simple solutions to their complicated problems. What we have here is the work of a confident director who somehow makes the film feel like a work of mature exploitation. Because it’s a film of characters glowering and calculating, working their way through logic bordering on labyrinthine into triangulations that will hopefully give them the best advantage when on the other side of this bloody mess, moments of incredible violence (one man's whipped so hard his eyeball pops out of its socket) and icky tortures both physical and psychological (especially uncomfortable and unnecessary is a video that Del Toro shows Lively late in the film) feel both shocking and inevitable.

Stone’s always, especially in his more clearly political films, been interested in authority, who has it, who benefits from it, who is hurt by it, whether it be soldiers (Platoon, Born on the Forth of July), presidents (Nixon, W.), politicians (JFK), bankers (Wall Street), conquerors (Alexander), and media forces both institutions (Any Given Sunday) and the infamous (Natural Born Killers). In Savages, the only real authority in the drug trade comes from what can be bought with threats and violence. This is an unstable situation. What makes this a compelling representation of this concept is the way Stone keeps a sharp eye on the characters as they slowly make their moves towards gaining or retaining the upper hand.

Here, after a big violent shootout, one character begs the others to pull to the side of the road and vomits out of the getaway car. This is a vicious movie filled with scared characters desperately trying to find their way back into some kind of comfort zone, an amount of weary realism in aggressive, stylized pulp. Stone may eschew nuance for intensity, but he provides the texture to keep things interesting. It’s telling that, although Stone isn’t out to make any sort of overtly political statement and no character could be considered a moralistic center, at different points in the movie the Americans and the Mexicans each call the other “savages” behind the others’ backs. And then they each get the chance to live down to that description.

Berk! Non Merci: FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

I don’t for one second think that From Paris with Love is as xenophobic, racist, and sexist as Charlie Wax, the bulky covert-ops agent who is played by John Travolta and is the center of this action movie. And yet, the movie never quite figures out how to handle him. Travolta looks the part for a goofy actioner; he’s striking enough with a bald head and dangling earrings, but, even though he’s given sometimes fun action moments to deliver, he’s also given jokey one-liners that are just a little queasier than they should be.

Take, for instance, the scene that finds him with his new partner, a just promoted agent played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, infiltrating the Parisian headquarters of a Chinese drug ring. The scene starts reasonably promising as Travolta runs ahead of Meyers up a spiral staircase. The camera stays with Meyers as he reacts in shock as fresh corpses spin down the center of the staircase. When we and he finally catch up to Travolta, Meyers asks “How many more of them are there?” Travolta replies, “About a billion.” It’s initially funny, but it doesn’t sit well.

I’m afraid this character might play a little too well to the kind of action fan who can’t parse the finer points of shoot-em-up satire, as that’s precisely what the film is. Travolta’s character is most definitely a satire of the American stereotype of with-us-or-against-us win-at-all-costs mentality, but at some point during the making of the film, I think the point got lost, or at least obscured.

This is the third film from French director Pierre Morel. His first was the fast-paced District B13, a futuristic parkour film which suffers only from action sequences vastly more skillful than the film that houses them. Next, he made last year’s blockbuster hit Taken, in which Liam Neeson trashes through Paris looking for the men who kidnapped his vacationing daughter. That film was better than Morel’s first, with a tense lead performance from the reliable Neeson, but the film comes up short, literally, ending much too quickly after wasting its first act on so much vapid character building. We needed to see more of Neeson in action instead of us waiting around to see if he would finally decide to buy that new karaoke machine, even if the action was a little off-putting with its waves of anonymous villainous Middle-Easterners. With From Paris with Love Morel has backslid, creating a movie that only sporadically springs to life in the enjoyable action moments that he’s starting to become known for.

This is a movie that is a junky mess, an unhealthy combination of French sleaze and American grease. It’s a grimy, often unenjoyable affair with smarm put precisely where the charm should be. Travolta plops through the movie as a giant moving ham oddly disconnected from the action, while Meyers stammers and looks bewildered at his co-star’s antics. Neither of them engaged me in any way and they had no help from the plot, which takes so long to actually get started that I was surprised that a plot showed up at all. This is one seriously dormant action movie, curiously without any sense of forward momentum or even much energy of any kind. I was also surprised that the movie managed to pull off a fairly surprising late-breaking twist, but I was quickly disappointed to see how goofy, and off-putting, said twist really was.

I enjoyed the aforementioned spiral staircase shootout and a third-act car chase that has Travolta leaning out of the passenger window while brandishing a rocket launcher. Some of the shots of Paris look quite wonderful as the landmarks flash by. I was grateful that the movie ends up settling into being irritating instead of putrefying into something actively repulsive. There’s a nugget of an enjoyable movie here, but between the uneasy handling of a deliberately offensive character and the stagnant plotting, there’s not much to latch onto. Morel has potential to be a great action director. Hopefully with his next film he can become one.