Don Wislow's Savages is one of the most entertaining, thrilling and original crime novels of the decade, a gloriously depraved and fast-paced adventure taking in surfer stoners, terrifying Mexican cartels and crooked cops on the take, as they all somehow get mixed up in a drug war none of them really want to be a part of. Oliver Stone's Savages, meanwhile, is none of the above. Well, it has the same basic plot and dialogue of Wislow's original book, but basically nothing else. It's a damp squib of a film that fails to capture even an iota of the frenetic speed and intensity of the novel, replacing it with...well, late-era John Travolta. We were optimistic when we saw the film's initial cast list as, besides Travolta, it had a good mix of old and new talent: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Salma Hayek, Uma Thurman, Emile Hirsch, Blake Lively...and Benicio del Toro, as the story's principal antagonist Miguel "Lado" Arroyo, a psychopathic and bloodthirsty mob boss who doesn't think twice about chainsawing a few heads off to send a message. What should have been one of the great screen villains of our time instead turned out to be del Toro wearing a silly wig, speaking in a silly voice, barely even bothering to say his lines properly. What happened?