By Peter Covino

Lifestyles Editor

Savages is not as visionary as Natural Born Killers, and it isn’t as emotional as Born on the Forth of July. But Oliver Stone’s take on the Don Winslow novel, is a “welcome home” of sorts to a director who has mostly floundered for the past decade.

Savages is a quite good action/thriller focusing on the lives of a love triangle, two former high school buddies and the girlfriend they both love. The two guys also produce some of the highest-grade marijuana in California, and by default, the world.

Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) could not be more unlike. Ben is a practicing Buddhist, a guy with a soul, who uses a lot of the money he has made from his marijuana fortune to help others. Chon is former Navy Seal and is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and not surprisingly, is the enforcer of their family business.

They both love Ophelia (“O” for short), played by Blake Lively. She has sex with both of them (one at a time) in the  opening 15 minutes of the film. It is an arrangement that has been working out quite happily for some time.

The love fest in Laguna Beach (with a really great nest) comes to a screeching halt when a Mexican Cartel (headed up by Selma Hayek with Benicio Del Toro as one of her top henchman) want a cut of the goodies.

When Ben and Chon are not receptive enough to their deal, the Mexican baddies kidnap O and threaten to kill her (slowly and painfully) if they do not comply. Yes, they are savages.

But Ben, and particularly Chon, are not about to go whimpering into the sunset, with their tails between their legs. They too can play the savages game.

Savages is often violent, in a Quentin Tarentino kind of way (he wrote the screenplay for Stone’s Natural Born Killers) and maybe not particularly believable, but this is more of a violent fantasy.

While Johnson, Kitsch and Lively, pretty much keep their acting in check, Hayek and Del Toro and John Travolta (he’s a dirty federal agent) get to have all of the fun over-playing their roles.

Savages plays out pretty well with good guys you want to win and bad guys you can only hope have a unhappy ending.

And Stone also obliges by gives us plenty of both, by having one of those twist endings, right out of the Tarentino playbook.

Critic's rating: B

Rated R