Savages, Seven magazine review - Telegraph Oliver Stone's Savages is a silly, drug-addled thriller set in California, which begins with a burst of primary colours: a blissed-out blonde, "O" (Blake Lively), on the yellow sand of Laguna Beach, flanked by vivid blue sea. Before long, however, the dominant hue is red, as blood seeps out to stain the stoner dream. The men love "O," but love each other more, and the film treats this set-up with the minimum of interest. All the anxiety is elsewhere, in the lurid shape of the Baja Cartel, an ultra-violent Mexican drugs gang that wants a piece of Californian action. It is run by Salma Hayek (a voluptuous, bejewelled tyrant who brings a kind of earthy megalomania to proceedings) and announces its arrival with a video-clip featuring a multiple beheading. When the California natives decline partnership, the cartel brutally kidnaps "O," and thereafter Ben and Chon must fight the Mexicans on their own ground to recover her. This inevitably means a plunge into nasty stuff - although mercifully, unlike the Cartel's enforcer, Lado (a dead-eyed, leering Benicio del Toro), they draw the line at rape. As the film hurtles further into trashy excess, it leaves what little brain it ever had behind at the beach, and wallows pointlessly and messily in voyeuristic violence. Lado is certainly repellent, but he's a cut-price, obvious creep: none of the scenes in which he slaughters those around him raise half the tension of the one in the Coen brothers" No Country for Old Men, in which Chigurh, Javier Bardem's hitman, simply asks an elderly gas station attendant to toss a coin. The threat of killing makes one feel nervous, but the lingering display of killing merely makes one feel nauseous. If I were a director, I know which sensation I would pursue.