Savages is Oliver Stone without even the affectation of ideas. It takes the saint-and-sadist duality from Platoon and tosses it into the berserker butchery of Natural Born Killers. (But in Mexico!) For more than an hour, it is a very bad movie—mostly because it stars Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, a water-resistant bronzer in search of a spontaneous gesture. She’s the center of a leggy three-way with Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson, Laguna Beach weed kingpins who fall into escalating negotiations south of the border. These are television actors exposed and embarrassed on the big screen. But then everybody here is discredited a little: Salma Hayek vamping as a cartel boss, John Travolta inflated into a bulging, cartoon smiley face. The second half of the movie might also be bad, although it’s hard to say, since it’s also breathtakingly violent. The torture and slaughter are so extravagant—bullwhips, dangling eyeballs, ice chests—that the characters and audience both show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. If Savages has no political compass (as a treatise on Mexican drug wars, it makes Will Ferrell’s #Casa de mi Padre# look like a William Finnegan report), well, golly: It has no conscience whatsoever.