Movie review: Savages ***

Stars: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, John Travolta
Director: Oliver Stone
Rated: R
Showing: Southside Cinema week of Friday, September 7 – daily at 7:45pm except Sunday 4:30|7:45pm. For more information call 297-2821.
Runtime: 130 minutes
Crime/drama

At least until its tacked-on happy ending, Savages is a tightly wound and vastly entertaining pulp thriller - it's perhaps director Oliver Stone's strongest work since Nixon (1995).

Freed from the burden of having to say something "important", Stone gets back to what he does best, mixing brash showmanship with gleeful provocation.

Savages doesn't have the moral imagination and emotion reach of his greatest works - Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994) - but it's propelled by the same half-crazed energy and purposefulness. This director is never better than when he's rooting at our rawest societal nerves.

Based on Don Winslow's 2010 novel, a short-tempered war veteran Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and his do-gooder, Berkeley-grad best buddy Ben (Aaron Johnson) have become low-level drug kingpins, cultivating a higher-class brand of pot with seeds from Afghanistan. Chon and Ben live an idyllic life with the beautiful Ophelia (Blake Lively), O for short, whom they both share as a girlfriend, mostly insulated from the seedier aspects of the drug trade.

The opening section of Savages moves with bullet-speed, complete with rapid-fire edited flashbacks and a pair of fairly graphic sex scenes. The movie - as its title suggests - is about how we're all savages at heart, motivated by sex, food and illicit stimulation, and willing to get brutally violent when our sanctity is threatened. And when a powerful Mexican cartel reaches out to Chon and Ben, eager to become business partners, things turn very violent indeed.

The cartel is run by Elena (Salma Hayek), a purring diva in Tijuana not above ordering the beheadings of those who have crossed her. Her chief henchmen in the United States are Alex (Demian Bichir) and Lado (Benicio Del Toro), who orchestrate the kidnapping of O, at which point Elena issues Ben and Chon an ultimatum: Join us, or her head gets cut off next. Caught in the middle of all this is the DEA agent Dennis (John Travolta), who's on the take from more than one source, and who would be willing to sell anyone out to the next highest bidder.

Stone turns it into a fascinating story of generational divide and spiritual malaise in the early 21st century. The three younger characters embody a very distinct, Gen-Y conundrum: They want to be able to live on their own terms without also having to reckon with the brutalities of the modern world. The older characters, meanwhile, are all hustlers: They've got kids they're trying to put through college, families they're trying to protect. Despite the millions of dollars at stake, they're basically just trudging along with the rest of us in the 99 percent.

It's only in the final stretch that the movie stumbles, when Stone serves up one ending and then doubles back and serves up another. The first ending is right out of the novel, and had he cut himself off there, Stone might have given us one of the most powerful nihilistic visions of a world turned upside down since his own Natural Born Killers. Instead, he opts for an unconvincing, let's-tie-up-all-the-bows coda.

Make no mistake, even with that botched finale, Savages is eminently worth seeing.