Savages

Taylor Kitsch may have been robbed of his first shot to become 2012’s next big leading man by the lukewarm reception of John Carter, but he still has two more at-bats: May’s giant robot franchise machine Battleship and this summer’s Savages, the grittier yet no less explosion-filled thriller from Oliver Stone. Fortunately there are plenty of other big names to help him carry the latter, as Stone has assembled an all-star cast for his adaptation of Don Winslow’s bestselling novel about sex, drugs, and people shooting each other. Kitsch co-stars with Aaron Johnson as a pair of peaceful pot growers connected by their ménage à trois with Blake Lively’s (possibly dead!) surfer girl, with the two forced to break out of their blissful stoner haze to rescue her after she’s kidnapped by Benicio Del Toro, working for a Mexican drug cartel to twist the reluctant drug traffickers’ arms into joining forces.

Also on board: John Travolta—admirably sans wig—pops up as a federal agent and Uma Thurman’s in there somewhere. And speaking of wigs, confusingly, Salma Hayek seems to have borrowed Thurman's Pulp Fiction tresses to play an icy cool drug lord. The ’90s feel doesn’t stop there, as the violence and general sleazy tone hark back to Stone’s ‘90s thrillers like U-Turn and Natural Born Killers, with an extra blast of Tony Scott for emphasis. Anyway, Universal originally had this slated to run in the more serious fall season, but apparently felt that all the grimy action and the lure of familiar names made it a potential summer sleeper, hence its debuting opposite The Amazing Spider-Man on July 6. For those who might already be bored with superhero movies by then, this could end up being an acceptably over-the-top substitute.

(In case the above video gets pulled, MTV also has it here.)