rgu-29744 If you're looking for a movie that... ?? Wastes time, demos bad acting, plot...umm, everything, this is it. I'm thinking Travolta owed someone a favor. Some high priced actors making a mockery of good movies. My sympathy for anyone who prides (directly) to see this.

peggysegel One of Stone's best recent films==mixing his trademark, colorful violent techniques with a good story and a great cast.

alevinadresi I watched the movie after reading many bad comments about it and after having already watched some really good cartel movies. I don't think Oliver Stone wanted to give us a gruesome cartel thriller. Yes, there were some bloody or merciless scenes but they only formed a small portion of the movie and did not distort the general entertaining mood of the movie, which I believe was Oliver Stone's real intention. He threaded it a bit lightly and kept the movie quite entertaining. This is what I would call a laid-back cartel movie that offers you a bit of everything: Love, sex, violence, excitement, revenge. People criticized the young actors too harshly here but that might be caused by their being overshadowed by veteran actors. Come on, how can you keep up with Benicio:) One thing I agree with other reviewers was that there was not any chemistry Ben, Chon and O (Blake) that makes you believe they are actually in love, but didn't it eventually turn out that their love was not real anyway? Oliver made you feel that there was something missing in their relationship from the beginning. Still, when you are finished with the movie, you end up feeling something was missing and that you are not fully satisfied. Yet, what made this movie so special to me was the mind-blowing performance of Benicio Del Toro as Lado. Oh my. He was phenomenal. He looks such a good mannered cool guy in real life that it is so hard to believe he can play such a psycho but he really plays it so well, makes you believe that he is that bad, and makes you love him anyway. It has been a couple of days since I watched the movie, and his scenes keep playing in my mind on a loop. I think this was one of his best performances, and I can watch this movie all over again simply to watch him. But would I rate this movie 8 out 10 without him? Probably not. I would probably give a 5 star if Benicio was not in it. So Kudos to Oliver Stone for giving us one of the most phenomenal bad guys on the silver screen. On a final note, I really loved the colors in this movie. As a foreigner, it made me jump on the first plane to see California. All in all, it is an entertaining movie with some great performances.

CANpatbuck3664 This was an attempted comeback by Oliver Stone to a harder and edgier subject, the war on drugs. What I found is that several people in this movie were looking for a comeback hit; Taylor Kitsch was coming of a couple of box office disasters, Aaron Taylor-Johnson hasn't had a hit since Kick Ass, Blake Lively is returning to the screen after Green Lantern and Hick. They have a lot of solid actors in this cast and Stone seems like the right guy to direct this. I mean drugs, guns, the mob, where could this go wrong? But the bottom line is that a lot of people need this movie to hit it big and while it did get decent reviews, I have to tell you it's not going to get that kind of praise from me.*Minor Spoilers Ahead* The film is narrated by O (Blake Lively) and she introduces us to the situation. She is a young woman carrying on a devils three way of a romance with 2 marijuana dealers named Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch). They grow the best pot on the west coast of the United States. Each of them brings something to the operation. Ben has a degree from Cal-Berkeley in botany and is the brains behind the actual growing of the weed. He's essentially a hippie, he's very non-violent and believes in conducting business that way. Chon is the muscle. He is a former Navy SEAL who came back from Afghanistan with a love of cannabis and some PTSD. He is the aggression behind the operation. I would like to clarify though, he's not outwardly violent but if they have to intimidate to collect from a client, it's him running the call.The 3 of them are enjoying a thriving business. They have a great reputation with their suppliers and their customers. They also have an inside man in the DEA named Dennis (John Travolta) who watches their back. One day, they get a very violent video message from the Mexican drug cartel thug Lado (Benicio Del Toro) telling them they want to meet up and talk business. Ben is overseas and Chon and O are too stoned to properly comprehend it. After Ben gets back they talk amongst themselves about it and then they talk to Dennis who tells them that they don't really have a choice.I have to admit, reading the plot summary I could objectively see how this is a pretty cool set up. But where I thought this movie fell down was that it missed the ABCs of doing a story where the filmmakers want us to care about the fates of the characters they present to us. A) Make the characters at least relatively easy to like, or they should at least have redeeming characteristics. The biggest reason why this movie didn't connect with me is that I was so frustrated with how these people behave in stressful situations. O was the biggest problem, she's carrying on a stupid love triangle and she has no skills except being hot. When she's taken she whines to her captors about the food, her weed withdrawal and ultimately even about her not knowing who the group's leader is. You don't sympathize with Ben because he was an idiot not to know that this was going to happen. Chon is maybe the most honest character but he is so wooden (his character not Kitsch) that the movie makes it clear he's not fully human. Lado enjoys torturing and killing people. Dennis is a two-timing rat and Elena is a ruthless but ultimately soft leader with little dimension outside the fact she misses her family. I had no reason to care about any of these people and it was like watching a sporting event where you don't care who wins.B) Telling an interesting story is priority number one. I will at least give this movie credit for having a coherent plot line; most movies I hate lack that. But what parts of this story that are interesting are either wrecked by increasingly pointless bits of violence or are stretched out over the movie's ridiculous run time. This movie should have been 30 minutes shorter. The plot continues to jump around via O's uninteresting narration and repeatedly kills any momentum it is building. This movie could have been just a stupid revenge action movie with a lot of violence and guns and I would have liked it so much better. They had an interesting premise but the twists the story takes undercut it completely.Okay, I've ripped on this movie enough, let's get to some of the more admirable aspects. Stone puts a lot of effort into developing a visual style for the movie. Normally I would like this but it didn't mean a whole lot when I was so frustrated with the characters and the meandering plot. But I can respect the effort that was put in to it. I also thought some of the acting was o.k. I would give Selma Hayek and Taylor Kitsch the best marks. I don't like Aaron Taylor-Johnson here, he seems really unemotional, he's just not effective in Savages. Del Toro has zip dimension to his character and all he does is betray and torture people, he's better in Sicario. Travolta was fine and Blake Lively has been good in other things but I couldn't enjoy her performance because of her character.I started out wanting to like this movie. I could tell it was going to be edgy but I just got so tired of it by the end and I just gradually grew more and more angry with it. There's no excuse for the terrible characterization or the 2+ hours this movie takes to wrap up. There were okay points but that doesn't redeem Savages.