Oliver Stone used to be regarded as one of the most potent and incendiary voices in mainstream Hollywood, which is exactly what you’d expect from the director behind politically-charged and critically acclaimed dramas including Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon.
Despite having a string of classics under his belt, though, Stone’s stock dropped significantly throughout the 21st Century, matters that weren’t helped by the tepid reactions that greeted the likes of World Trade Center and W. despite both falling firmly within his wheelhouse, as well as the disastrous Alexander, the filmmaker’s passion project that flopped spectacularly at the box office to go down in history as one of the biggest bombs of all-time.
The 74 year-old hasn’t helmed a feature since 2016’s Snowden, but one of his more unsung later movies is coming to Netflix next month on March 16th. Savages stars Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead roles as a pair of marijuana entrepreneurs who share Blake Lively as a girlfriend, before Salma Hayek’s ruthless cartel leader moves onto their turf, leading to a war between the factions with John Travolta‘s unscrupulous DEA agent caught in the middle.
The pic managed to turn a small profit in theaters after earning $83 million on a $45 million budget, but reviews were bang average, with the thriller currently holding a 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It isn’t Stone’s best work by any means, but it’s nonetheless refreshing and enjoyable to see the writer of Conan the Barbarian and Scarface dive headfirst into wild genre territory for the first time in a long time having become pre-occupied with political machinations and digs at our corporate overlords for so many years.