To put it kindly, Blake Lively is not the ideal crime film narrator. Her detached line reading doesn't really drag you into Savages; it's more like a light breeze to accompany the beautifully shot idyllic beaches of southern California. It doesn't help, either, that Lively has to read rehashed pulpy drivel about her romantic relationship with a pair of men. As a rich girl named O, Lively informs us of her lovers' different approaches: "Chon is cold metal. Ben's warm wood." Chon (Taylor Kitsch, in his third cinematic strike of the year after Battleship and the underrated John Carter) is a veteran who has recently left the military, though the military hasn't left him: O confides that when she has sex with Chon, "I have orgasms. He has wargasms." Ben (Aaron Johnson, doing a third-rate Steve Jobs impersonation) is a genius who has created a few perfect strains of marijuana. Together, the two men (with O around as fuckbuddy and ornamentation) built a small-but-excessively profitable drug-running business.

Cue the stereotypically evil Mexicans. Salma Hayek is a drug lord trying to get a foothold in the United States, and Benicio Del Toro is her muscle, a hitman ingeniously disguised as a landscaper. Del Toro is all brutal menace, casually shooting holes in people. It's a performance that alternates between brilliant physicality (a sex swing is hanging in the background of his hotel room as he takes a meeting) and hilarious overacting (he literally twirls his moustache at one point). Lest you forget that these are some evil Mexicans, they kidnap O and hold her hostage when the boys refuse to sell their business and growing know-how to the cartel.

Savages is a bloody, ignorant escapade of a thing, an ill-tempered, dark crime thriller starring a bunch of vapid pretty things who bump into one another until somebody falls down. Oliver Stone seems stuck in his 1990s mode of filmmaking, with different film stocks, filters, and visual effects slathered all over the movie, with no apparent reason behind his choices. Speaking of stuck in the 90s: Was John Travolta ever a good actor? He has a small-but-significant part in Savages, and he seems lately to be a more earnest, less talented version of his old Face/Off acting partner Nicolas Cage. Travolta is a ham who seems to be self-aware, but he doesn't have Cage's imagination or wit, so his acting consists of the same bad decision over and over again.

It's all a tolerable sort of awful movie for a while. The white guys kick the shit out of the evil Mexicans. Stone unabashedly wants you to cheer on his muscular ciphers because they're supposedly the good guys in this little penny dreadful. But the ending features a storytelling decision so self-indulgent and cliched that you can't help but get mad at the waste of your time. All we expect out of our sleazy crime thrillers is a little dirty twist now and again. Savages doesn't bother to twist; it just dumbly clocks you in the side of a head with a two-by-four and hopes that Lively whispering sweet nothings in your ear makes up for the brutality of the experience. It doesn't.