Savages - Plugged In

Violent Content

Savages seethes with the carnage that reflects the violent nature of the ongoing drug wars in Mexico. The bloodshed and the violations that the camera focuses upon offer a brutal, fictionalized representation of that reality. As such, they’re meant to feel real and painful and terrible.

When O is in the custody of the cartel, a terrifying enforcer named Lado makes threatening, lewd come-ons. He cuts a bloody steak and feeds it to her, piece by piece. When she requests a hit of marijuana, he takes a toke, then forces her mouth to his and blows the smoke into her. All this culminates in rape, which takes place when O is so drugged up that she doesn’t immediately remember … until Lado shows her the video of the deed taken with his phone. (We glimpse images of him pressing himself upon her sexually against a fence; both are mostly clothed.)

Another video shows a concrete floor covered in blood and littered with decapitated heads. On the walls, we see mutilated, headless bodies skewered on stakes or hung upside down. A man in a mask picks up a head and appears ready to hurl it at the camera.

Lado goes to a lawyer’s house and shoots the man in both kneecaps, leaving him screaming in pain as Lado talks on the phone. Before hanging up, he finishes the poor soul off. He then forces one of his henchmen to shoot the dead man’s wife—blood spattering over their faces. It’s suggested Lado and his team cut up the bodies and take them away.

Lado tortures a suspected snitch in Elena’s operation. The victim is hung up by chains and whipped across his body and face. He’s beaten so horribly that one of his eyeballs has popped out and hangs from its socket. The man does not confess until Lado threatens to do horrible things to his wife and kids. He then confesses (to a crime he did not commit). Lado tells him that protecting his family is honorable: “I would give you a better death, but I would set a bad example,” he says. He then puts a tire around the man’s neck, soaks the man in gasoline and tells Ben to drop a flare into it (which he does), immolating the shrieking man.

Several people die from close-range gunshots (we often see blood and brain matter splatter), or from knives to the jugular (one man bleeds out in a car). Someone’s hand gets stabbed and pinned to the back of a car seat. A massive gunfight leaves everyone involved dead or nearly so, blood gurgling and seeping from gory wounds. Three people apparently kill themselves by injecting some sort of drug. Cartel members tell Chon to put a gun in his mouth and put his hand on the trigger—telling him they’ll cut off O’s fingers if he doesn’t. Chon obeys.

We see bleeding faces and hear a chain saw start up as the prelude to a massacre. Lado “fires” an employee by shooting him in the face. People are kidnapped and kept in wretched conditions. Drug users and runners are threatened with death. Cars explode.