I was a little surprised by some of the venom in these reviews, because the film is decently shot with great veteran actors (in secondary parts, unfortunately). But this is an Oliver Stone movie. We expect the heavy handed morality lesson to be told with a touch of irony, if not humour. No real irony here. There are two major problems, the leads and the script. First, the three main characters are a threesome so intimately bonded that even the otherwise mild mannered botanist-businessman Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is driven to horrible, immoral acts to rescue her after she (Blake Lively) is kidnapped to ensure that the independent pot-growing and dealing partners (Taylor-Johnson and Taylor Kitsch) will accept a deal with a Mexican drug cartel. Yet we are never really given any hint why the bond is so strong, except when the queen of the cartel (a brilliant Salma Hayek) chats with her hostage and suggests that the two boys love each other more than they love her, otherwise they would never share. This, BTW, is a pivotal scene because the love interest Lively reveals herself to be an uneducated airhead; drug queen Hayek has the best line of the movie; "Do all Americans talk like that?", addressed to Lively after she says she dropped out of community college after a semester and a half because she "didn't get along with institutions". In the end, none of the three has any real emotional depth; they script even tries to excuse Kitsch's wooden acting by implying something deep, like he's dead inside from the war, man. It doesn't work. We'd like to see a hidden, tormented self to make it believable that these three can be motivated to do anything more than catch the next wave when surf's up. Yes, I know there's a back-story that Ben makes good on his ill-gotten drug money by digging a well or two in Indonesia or some other Peace Corps venue, but it sounds really shallow and trendy instead of committed and complex. The real problem is the script. It's just horrible and shallow. Only the secondary actors do anything at all with this mess: John Travolta as a corrupt DEA agent who turns into a sort of hero, Benicio Del Toro, who's got scary whack job down to a science, and Hayek the drug queen who manages to convey that this isn't the life she would have chosen but nonetheless accepts it as a destiny that must be fulfilled and played out to its bitter end. For the rest, the pacing is pretty good; the ultra gory violence is believable and well-integrated into the script, the camera work excellent. Stone usually presents us with morally ambiguous characters or contrasts apparently evil people with an even more evil "system" (Wall Street, Natural Born Killers), forcing us to have some sympathy for the evil protagonist and eventually to call into question the morality of a system that can turn decent and even idealistic people into killers of weasels. Not here. Sure, the system is bad, but not because people deal in drugs but because they are shallow, hedonistic airheads. The three main protagonists are not evil because they are too shallow to be evil. Even when Taylor-Johnson kills the man he and his partner falsely set up as a patsy in a sting operation they ran, and then throws up apparently disgusted with himself, well, wouldn't you know that next day he's so stone cold capable of lying to the Mexican cartels and convincing them he had nothing to do with the sting. Is Stone now always to be tired and formulaic, depending on his three great actors in secondary roles, or is the sign of worse things to come?
