Savages - Luke McKay

Savages is Black Hawk Down meets Blue Crush, with the occasional scene made awesome as shit by the presence of Benicio Del Toro’s glorious hair/acting.  The three main characters are so boring.  I despise their stupid privileged lives, especially Ophelia’s.  There is nothing remotely worthwhile about Blake Lively’s character except, some may argue, her extremely un-unique rich ass surfer girl hotness.  Her character is a prop.  Her only purpose is being the object of desire tossed back and forth between California and Mexico.  As far as I can tell she’s desired only because she’s hot.  But she would be way hotter if she like, I don’t know, had a sense of humor or played the harpsichord but wasn’t very good at it but kept insisting on playing songs she’d just written or something.  Why can’t she be something real and new?  Ben and Chon are the main(er) characters, and the ones who have a supposedly functional love triangle thing going on with Ophelia, and they suck too.  Basically all three characters are plastic action figures freshly plucked from the still warm recesses of their factory molds.  They’re not even painted yet.  There is nothing distinguishable about them for fear of flitting too close to the edge of what is acceptable within pop culture’s strict calipers.  The plot was very entertaining, but the movie is all plot and no character.  I guess that does it for some people.  Lado, played by Del Toro, is one redeeming component of the movie.  But it’s rare (impossible?) for Benicio Del Toro not to be awesome.  I have a feeling his part wasn’t written as awesome as he made it.  Also, my friend Tedd pointed out a highly allusive scene in which Lado sniffs cocaine off of the tip of a bowie knife, as perhaps a self-given good game butt pat to Del Toro’s character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Out of 10, I give this movie a 5, because half of the time the movie was an 8 and the other half it was a 2.  As an afterthought I’d like to disclaim a bit of the above negativity by mentioning that the Navy Seal loving always camouflaged and jackknife smuggling little boy in me loved the urban warfare scenes, although he admits that good characters are still important.