Oliver Stone's first hit as a director was "Salvador," way back in 1986, which looked at a small Latin American nation's descent into political murder, funded mostly by its larger neighbor to the north. Now, with "Savages," he seems to have come full circle, as Latin America's plague of disappearances and torture crosses back into the country that bred it. (And if you doubt that claim, read up on what the U.S. military teaches its Latin American counterparts at the notorious School of the Americas.)
Stone always aims to be topical, and "Savages" focuses on both California's barely illegal marijuana trade and the headline-grabbing violence of Mexican drug cartels, kind of like "Blow" meets "True Romance."
Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) are a pair of dealers who share a lover, O (Blake Lively), at their upscale Laguna Beach home. Their operation is efficient and basically pretty chill, under the leadership of Buddhisty Ben, but if someone crosses them, Iraq War veteran Chon has no problem getting medieval on them. O, noting their different approaches in bed, suggests that "together they make one man."