Keep calm and say it out loud: I’m back! Without any long description of my trip, at least not today, I will continue on reviewing the movies I have seen this month which is already a lot. Doing this while being totally aware of my enormous pile of school work that isn’t going to do itself, I’m a bit worried since I have all my priorities messed up. But I can’t help myself, I love to blog and review and.. I’m just super happy to be back. Even if being back means negatively reviewing Savages – not all movies have a good impact even if they have all the right ingredients.
Imagine my surprise when I heard the sentence featured on the image above, I literally paused the movie, pressed rewind and listened to it again just to be sure that it was as ridiculous as I heard it the first time. This was just the beginning, it continued as such with Lively reading the voice-over with her rather okay voice and trying to be, what I assume she always aims at, philosophically mellow. That would have been achievable, I actually do enjoy her voice, but the whole script and the fact that she kept having sex with two guys separately and together, ruined the whole vibe from the beginning. As a side note to the sex comment, the ass-parade from Kitsch and Taylor-Johnson was probably the highlight of the movie and it had less to do with the movie and more to do with hormones.
I don’t really want to go in depth with the plot, I’m quite sure if I try to summarize it I will loose the power to keep reviewing it because honestly, it was probably the most uncomfortable story I have seen in a long time. It was just a mess and the biggest part of that mess was the voice-over! To clarify, I do have a love and hate relationship with voice-overs because mostly they do not work and Savages is a perfect example of the struggle to make the movie sound better by reading over it. With lines like “I have orgasms, he has war-gasms” it seems rather unlikely that the movie would be better in the end because seriously, who says such things? It doesn’t even sound good, especially when Lively and Kitsch are humping in the background – some people enjoy their sex scenes in a quiet setting or by having a great soundtrack not Lively saying things a 14 year old would say while trying to sound like a profound poet.
On top of all that, the plot continued to prolong the final event and the movie just kept going and going for two hours! Sad thing about it, Savages failed to take me along with the story because I was mostly not interested: for me, the movie lost its appeal in the beginning. I assume, if cutting all that voice-over into a minimum and adding more ass-action into the opening scenes, I would have had a more positive attitude towards it. But assumptions won’t do any good now, as I get into the final end-game the movie offered and then destroyed.
Let me set the scene, they are exchanging the hostages and then the shooting begins, everybody gets shot except Lively and I guess Kitsch as well (I still wasn’t fully invested) and they all died in a manner of Romeo and Juliet but injecting a drug or something. Oh the intrigue and the poetry in that was just perfect, I wanted to re-watch it because I was certain I missed something and had to be sure of its awesomeness…. and then the voice of Lively told that all of that was in her head and nothing like that happened. In a second, I hated the movie even more because it was the perfect ending and then, it was not. Although, I do have to state that this is based on a novel so in a way, the blame should be pointed towards the author of the book but in this case, I would have changed the ending and faced the wrath of fans because end-game vol 1 was so much better!
This goes to show that final scenes have a great impact, and while the almost final scene in Savages had all the signs pointing to a direction of me re-watching the movie, the actual ending was far from it. I guess I don’t like happy endings nor endings that don’t surprise me, especially when there are great actors involved such as Benicio Del Toro and Salma Hayek, not to mention the well deserved nudity that stopped in the middle of the movie for some reason – if you are telling us he has war-gasms he better have lots of them!
Good review Ray. Something in this movie felt like it should have been nuttier and more wacky, but it was still entertaining enough to hold me over until the end. Also, glad to see Travolta totally chew-up the scenery in a snarky, but weird-role.
Hah, I didn’t feel Travolta, I did like Toro though, I think he has something-something going on.
Completely agree about the ending, that was such a cop out! Had the movie ended few minutes earlier it would be much better. I didn’t like the movie but I gave it 5/10 for Salma Hayek – she was a lot of fun here.
I was just super disappointed about the end so I gave it 2 out of 5 in the beginning but came back from my trip and was like, the hell with it, this wasn’t as good as the other 2 out of 5 one I have to review. (Really need a new rating system asap…)
Glad you felt this movie wasn’t too good. Enjoy your site quite a bit. Keep up the good work.
This film was awful, Stone needs to retire, he’s like a rockstar who can’t give up and just looks more and more ridiculous the older he gets.
Some learn and keep getting better, some do the opposite.
I quite liked it myself although it had a lot of ridiculous stuff and that the ending was really bad, but it had some cool moments and some great performances.
As for the alphabet blogathon, I’ve finished my post and scheduled it for Wednesday!
Wohoo! Wednesday is going to be cool then!
Hope you’ll like it!
I actually read the book which has the weirdo lines you mentions (wargasms, and all) but it plays much better on the page. Also, the ending of the book ends with what you say is the perfect ending. It seriously was great how it ended all Romeo and Juliet style. It was changed for the film! I was so pissed in theaters when they backtrack to the stupid happy wending.
HA! So it was the movie’s fault! Thank you for clearing that out. It felt like it wasn’t the novel but the movie’s fault!! Cool. I was right to hate the ending then.. it really did f*** the movie completely.