What I know about the internecine workings of Mexican drug cartels you could fill in an egg cup—and still have enough space left over for the egg. But this I know: It’s a subject and a subculture that has got to be more fascinating than anything in gonzo director Oliver Stone’s deadly, hateful, preposterous and cliché-riddled movie Savages. He even makes the violence look dull.
Based on one of those Don Winslow carnage epics that appeal to grown men who still read comic books, Savages boogies to the beat of an assault weapon, cutting back and forth between the cold-blooded drug lords in Tijuana and the stoner gringos of Southern California, fighting it out for billions in the Baja Peninsula. The convoluted plot, which would be difficult to decipher with the aid of a microscope, is as familiar as any one of a thousand cable network television series—and Mr. Stone’s dialogue is as wooden as a rocking chair, possibly because his script was co-written by the dubious Shane Salerno (Alien vs. Predator) and novelist Don Winslow, whose grasp of the way real people talk is as phony as reality TV.
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