Savages

The story of Oliver Stone’s latest, drawn from the novel by Don Winslow, has a pair of enterprising beach-boy stoners getting entangled in a violent conflict with a Mexican drug cartel. Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) are pot-growing tycoons whose imported-from-Afghanistan strain of high-grade marijuana draws some very hostile interest from the competition just below the California-Mexico border. The menacing attention comes chiefly from Elena (Salma Hayek), a cartel matriarch headquartered in Tijuana, and Lado (Benicio Del Toro), the maliciously enterprising enforcer ostensibly working on her behalf. And the tension is complicated further through the involvement of a double-dealing DEA agent named Dennis (John Travolta). But there’s also Ophelia (Blake Lively), known simply as “O,” who is the beloved of both Ben and Chon. The shining centerpiece in these golden boys’ ménage à trois, she is fated to become a funky damsel in distress. The film’s reductive character psychology, more or less mandated by some semi-incomprehensible cartwheels of the plot, is summed up in the title. The undercurrents of social psychology, however, prove more resonant—Afghanistan, Mexico, commando raids, the war on drugs, warlords and drug lords, power and profit, etc. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas and Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R.