There are many lamentable choices strewn about the history of the Academy Awards, especially when subsequent career choices of individual winners cast a dank shadow on their trophies. Although I’m loathe to offer it as a definitive conclusion, it’s possible there is no more perplexing truth generated by the ceremonies staged in my lifetime than the status of Oliver Stone as a two-time recipient of the Oscar for directing, putting him in the company of Elia Kazan, David Lean, and Billy Wilder. It’s not that he wasn’t reasonably deserving of those two competitive wins, for Platoon and Born of the Fourth of July (though, out of the nominated filmmakers, I would have opted for Woody Allen and Jim Sheridan for the years in question). But his artistic sensibility has degenerated into such an ungodly mass of frothing lunacy in the decades sense that it’s grown difficult to remember a time when he could be taken seriously at all.

Stone’s 2012 film Savages is a proper showcase for all of his worst creative tics. The pointless over-editing, the ludicrous dialogue built on smugly incoherent adoption of film noir styling, and the performances sharpened to inadvertent farce are all in place. The usual hyper-aggressive masculine posturing is also woven through the film, distributed generously to both male and female characters, which I’d wager Stone thinks is progressively minded. Stone also seems to believe that he’s offering criticism of the grotesque behaviors he depicts, but the relevant scenes and moments are executed with a lurid attentiveness that instead suggests that he gets off on the carnage.

Based on a novel by thriller machine Don Winslow, Savages is about a pair of brash young entrepreneurs in the marijuana racket who run afoul of a ruthless Mexican drug cartel. One of the partners is Chon (Taylor Kitsch), an ex-Navy Seal whose quick temper is further aggravated by flare-ups of post-traumatic stress stemming from his service in Afghanistan. Hippie botanist Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is the cooling agent in the team, pushing for more restrained, pragmatic solutions to their woes, at least until the situation goes fully sideways with the abduction of their shared girlfriend, O (Blake Lively). It’s just one of those rough work weeks.

The performances in the film are uniformly bad, though I’m not sure how much of the blame can be laid on the actors. Early in the film, Lively is required, in voiceover, to describe sex with Kitsch’s character by speaking the line “I have orgasms. He has wargasms.” A genetically enhanced super-being with the combined talent of Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Marlon Brando couldn’t make that dialogue work. That line is no aberration. The entire film is filled with faux cool dialogue, all clipped and tough and painfully inane, like what Elmore Leonard might have tapped out immediately after sustaining a nasty head injury. (And then surely thrown in the trash after regaining his senses.) Stone runs roughshod over logic and proves far too impatient to find any depth in the characters or meaning in the scenarios. Even in his best work, Stone often mistook freneticism for intensity, but Savages reaches new levels of narrative-imploding haste. Not a single element works, and the worst components rot further as the film scrambles forward.

I made it approximately halfway through Savages.

Previously in The Unwatchables…

— Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, directed by Michael Bay
— Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton
— Due Date, directed by Todd Phillips
— Sucker Punch, directed by Zack Snyder
— Cowboys & Aliens, directed by Jon Favreau
— After Earth, directed by M. Night Shyamalan
— The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster
— Now You See Me 2, directed by Jon M. Chu
— The Mummy, directed by Alex Kurtzman
— The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott
— Vice, directed by Adam McKay