Oliver Stone’s latest is a brash and dumb crime thriller set in the world of the Mexican drug war. Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson star as Laguna Beach dope dealers who get in over their heads when their girlfriend, Blake Lively, is kidnapped by a Mexican crime cartel. Revisiting the hyperactive visual styling of Natural Born Killers, but without the energy or compelling characters, Stone has created a vacuous and simplistic thriller that barely scratches the surface of the drug war or its one-dimensional characters.

Beginning with a nauseating and knowing voice over delivered by Lively’s O, the film starts on shaky ground and never improves. The chief problem with the film is the flat characterisation. Whether it is the…

Don Winslow's novel Savages is a clever, fast paced, self-aware, morally ambiguous book filled to the brim with extravagant characters and crisp, razor sharp and witty language.

This film is the polar opposite of that and the fact that Winslow was involved in writing the screenplay baffles me. I hope he was just there to make coffee for Mr. Stone.

This film fails at the most basic level there is. The three main characters we are asked to invest in have nothing for us to identify with and are completely and utterly uninteresting. In the novel they are funny and satirical archetypes. That works really well. In the film, for some reason, they had to be turned into real human…

"I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker. I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty."
-Tarantino on aging

This may be Oliver Stone's most entertaining film in over ten years strictly as a genre exercise, which is where he usually works best, but the man just keeps spinning his wheels as his hair grows grayer. His films have become childish. Polished silliness. The characters are so shockingly inept, I simply could not stop shaking my head at all of the irrational decisions they were making. Everyone is written as…

"What really happened was more of a f**k-up than a shootout." - O

Well, that was the most pleasant surprise of a film I've had in a while. After reading mostly negative/average reviews for the film adaptation of the best book I read in 2012, I was a bit too wary of watching this, afraid that it would only result in disappointment. But what I've found is a really fun, stylish and slightly flawed sucker-punch to the face.

Let's start with what everyone seems to be complaining about: the acting. I liked it. The bad guys are practically made of ham, and John Travolta is off-the-scale in terms of panicky over-acting, but this helps Savages get what it sets out…

Decent Oliver Stone thriller centering on two top-tier pot growers and their shared girlfriend, who become targeted by the Mexican mafia looking to take over their business.

The movie gets off on a bad foot with Blake Lively's brutal narration. The narration reappears now and then throughout the movie, and is completely unnecessary and her delivery just grates on me as does her character. That aside, the first act of Savages plays almost like you're coming into mid-season of a parallel "Breaking Bad," which I love, so I was fully onboard. However, story events take a fairly unwelcome turn and we move away from the overall world of power plays, double-crosses, and operations of the drug world into more generic…