The Short Review - Savages

Set a movie in decadent Southern California with a good looking version of Cheech & Chong and make it an action film, it would probably be better than Savages. This bombastic pile is only made more irritating by Blake Lively's breathy voice over. She is lovely to behold, terrible to hear and cursed with dumb dialog. However, this film features my favorite piece of Hollywood exposition. Early on, our protagonists and (only a scene or two later) antagonists refer to each other as savages. Oh, and John Travolta comes in and says savages at some point, but I forget who he was talking about. So just in case you don't get it, Oliver Stone puts the title right there in the dialog and the dialog is the title and the other way around too. (How's that for my own exposition, blogger style.) I do give him credit for only some blatant visual symbolism he is so fond of peppering his films with (Platoon, Natural Born Killers, JFK immediately spring to mind), but then again, this was a summer movie so you can't have the audience do too much work, can you? 

Phew! So what was my point here? Oh yeah, worth watching, but keep the cannabis close.