"Wanted" by Oliver Stone in Russian box office

Movie premiere

Oliver Stone's film Savages has been released. After watching it, MIKHAIL TROFIMENKOV painfully searched for the answer to the question: did the director find a second wind or fell into pre-agonal euphoria.

Stone believes he has captured the next chapter in what Borges would call “the story of American infamy,” which he has been writing for almost 30 years. That is, something as aggressively helpless and aggressively relevant as “The Twin Towers” and “Wall Street. Money Don’t Smell.” This time, according to the director, his civil wrath fell on legislative schizophrenia: according to California laws, marijuana can be grown and sold for medicinal purposes, but according to federal laws, those who carry out this humane mission are criminals.

Such “criminals” are Chon (Taylor Kitsch), who went through Iraq and Afghanistan, and botanist (by life and by profession) Ben (Aaron Johnson). Ben spends the proceeds from the best weed in the world, according to his clients, in the world, which they grow, to fight poverty in Africa and Asia. Federal agents, however, are not afraid of them, since they have long been on the payroll of friends. Another thing is the Mexican drug cartel "Queens" (headed by Elena), who offered the heroes an amicable forcible takeover, and as a declaration of intent sent a video in which its militants play football with severed heads.

At the starting point of the script, there is certainly an ideology. The heroes develop a utopia of the 1960s: a lot of weed and free love with the beautiful O (Blake Lively). Life as a threesome does not raise any questions due to the characters of Chon and Ben - or rather, their complete absence. Chon is power incarnate, Ben is love incarnate. That is, together (but not separately) they make up an ideal lover. The cartel is then the embodiment of monopoly capitalism, crushing independent entrepreneurs, and the film is yet another proof of the obvious thesis: the United States lost the war on drugs long ago and drug crime can be eliminated only by legalizing it.

But the whole ideology goes to hell around the tenth minute. Benicio del Toro bursts into the frame and, twirling his mustache, shoots the corrupt lawyer in the kneecaps, screaming: “You stole Robert Rodriguez’s money!” Lying on satin sheets, Elena is so inhumanly beautiful that until the very end the audience is unable to think about anything other than when Salma Hayek will finally take off her wig. Eventually a slurping John Travolta appears as corrupt drug buster Dennis.

This, of course, makes the film several heads above Stone's latest political opuses. But, I wonder, is he not afraid that Rodriguez and Tarantino will burst into his room screaming: “You stole our movie!”? Stone can argue, if he has time, that, unlike them, he films murder and torture in a truly sickening way. But the naturalism is mixed by the fact that all the reprisals are broadcast via Skype to interested parties, sometimes mutating into funny animation. Which, in turn, evokes parallels with the equally torn apart stylistically “Natural Born Killers”. But Stone should not make excuses for deciding to repeat the 1994 experiment: Tarantino will be completely furious. After all, he once scandalously renounced the script for “The Killers.”

Only because Stone himself has not figured out whether he is filming a new “Salvador” or a new “Assassins”, the two endings can be explained: all discussions on this matter about intertextuality are from the evil one. The first ending is incredibly bloody and logical in its own way: Mexican melodrama reaches tragic heights. The second is ironic and funny, but somehow childish, in the spirit of an anecdote about partisans: “And on the third day of fighting the forester came and drove everyone away.”

The best, that is, the most loyal way to watch a film is to treat it as an adaptation of the rhyme: “At the end of the century // Defeated forever // An evil man // A good man. // From a grenade launcher // Bam! And there is no goat. // After all good, it is // Stronger than evil." Moreover, Stone's goodness really opposes the Mexicans with their clumsy axes, taking with them a couple of grenade launchers.

Sweet smoke of the fatherland