Excellent casting, performances and storytelling by Stone. The major difficulty in watching his re-telling of the true story is the looseness with which he interprets the events and uses the creative license to fill in with completely fictional elements. This isn't a bad thing but, as with all Stone movies, he gives them the illusion of 'reality' by interspersing these fictional elements with the same weight as the real elements. Adding the text post-scripts further enhances this dichotomy and blurs the lines between the actual true story and the "true" story he is telling. James Woods does a phenomenal job of portraying a peripheral real life journalist into a main story character as written by Stone and Boyle. This movie is very entertaining, makes you think and should encourage those who are unfamiliar with the events of this time period and area to actually read up on the scholarly accounts of these events.

Even though this is one of Oliver Stone's lesser known films I believe this is one of his best. It is arguably the "Casablanca" of the 1980s, a love story wrapped inside a political film.As Richard Boyle (James Woods) ventures to report on the US-backed military junta in the client state of El Salvador he tries to recapture his love with Maria (Elpidia Carrillo) and help her family with the peril that is going on in the country. His crusade for human rights is the most heroic I've seen in any film particularly when he says he believes in human rights not just for some but for everybody.And the horror of the junta and death squads is evident and potent from the burnt human skeleton to the pile of human corpses in the valley to the slaughter of the innocent nuns. Tony Plana's beginning speech as Major Max sends chills down ones' spine.The film was entirely believable with powerful performances on both sides on the conflict. You really feel like you are on the streets of San Salvador, the training fields of the FMLN, and the immigration department of the United States.Oh, and Stone--you have COURAGE with a capital "C" filming this during the actual El Salvadoran Civil War.

As jobbing photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) and his friend Dr. Rock (James Belushi) guzzle booze and drugs in a red convertible on their journey south of the border, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching a sort of Fear and Loathing in El Salvador. But where Hunter S. Thompson journeys into the heart of the American Dream, Oliver Stone's semi-biographical thriller explores its outward reach as franchiser to the Third World. What emerges is an exposé of the superpower's influence in creating a late-twentieth-century Heart of Darkness.No sooner do Boyle and Dr. Rock settle into the roles of the partying gringos than they find rifles pointed at them at a military roadblock. 'Whatever you do Doc', warns Boyle, 'don't get on the ground.' The first in a series of tense, sweaty set-pieces, Boyle must defuse the situation, armed only with a couple of knock-off watches and his oily charm. It is in these scenes of forced laughter with grave locals that the self-confessed 'weasel' Boyle excels; his defining characteristic appears to be his knack for self-preservation. It is a role perfectly suited to its star: no one balances sleaze with intensity quite like James Woods.Leeching and lying his way through encounters with acquaintances and enemies, Boyle is a strange, flawed protagonist. He lacks the maverick talent traditionally bestowed on the anti-hero, which is here embodied in old friend John Cassady (John Savage), a photojournalist fiercely committed to the ideal of the world-changing shot. But as Boyle bears witness to the atrocities committed and hypocrisies inherent in the country's Civil War, he becomes more impassioned with every picture he takes. Where he is initially concerned with staying off of the dreaded ground, he grows to stand up for those who are stuck there.Stone shoots the movie much like a war-photographer, capturing the atrocities as an outsider, and wisely reigns in the visual excess that would come to define much of his nineties work. 'Gotta get close to get the truth', Cassady intones as he climbs over a mound of corpses, 'You get too close, you die'. Stone's camera stays eye-level with his protagonist, casting from above the American gaze over a people who live on their knees, or else are strewn lifelessly across the landscape.Behind the brutal military regime that tries to suppress the (equally brutal) peasant guerrillas sits the U.S. government. Their presence as 'advisors' lends a sense of futility to the battle-scenes: no matter how bravely or well each side fights, Stone suggests, the outcome will ultimately be decided amongst Americans in an office far removed from the battlefield. Boyle professes his patriotism in a climactic speech that fails to convince, in spite of Woods' best efforts; channelling the outspoken Stone himself, he reserves his most damning accusations for the government of his homeland.Despite slipping into the preachy and manipulative at times- a distressing scene involving a group of nuns is particularly heavy-handed, regardless of whether it is based in fact- this is an effective, tense thriller, with some interesting contemplations of journalistic and political responsibility. As much character piece as polemic, Salvador is highly recommended, for Woods' wired performance in particular.

Journalist Rick Boyle's life in San Francisco is a mess. He's broke, married to an Italian woman with a child, and -- deserted by them -- talks a gullible disk jockey friend into driving with him in his clunker down to El Salvador. It's a jolly ride at first, a little like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Boyle is aptly played by the tic-ridden James Woods and his companion by James Belushi. They have a lot of fun driving through Mexico stoned and drunk in their convertible.In Salvador, things take a more serious turn and end tragically. Woods' character takes us on a political tour of the grungy capitol city with its cervezarias and its whores and its dope and its thugs and its jails. We meet the American-supported right-wing dictator who blames all the unrest on the commies. The guy is running death squads, and when one of them murders an outspoken populist priest, the Army immediately arrest an innocent bystander.There is one of those sexy, blond, camera-ready reporters who swallows every lie she's fed by the government and the CIA about the nasty rebels and the unblemished dictator. There is the American military adviser lashing out against the KGB infiltrators who will work their way up from Central America to the Rio Grande. And there is the American ambassador, Michael Murphy, a naive, well-intentioned man who turns first one way then another in his support for the brutal Hefe.The story was co-written by Rick Boyle. He seems to know what he's talking about -- the bribes, the mindless police harassment, and the mountain of dead bodies in the official dumping ground. But it's not really much of a documentary, not if you take "documentary" to mean something like an objective portrait of a given historical moment.Boyle's and Stone's opinions keep popping up. The dictatorship is absolutely wrong. The independent and ineffectively armed rebels are right to fight against it, but the suggestion is that, once in power, they'll become equally ruthless. In a too-long harangue, Woods tells the audience -- I mean his two companions -- that "left-wing" is not the same as "communist", but Americans keep getting them mixed up. He himself, he proclaims, is a patriot, a true American who has seen war before in Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and believes it's wrong for the US to stick its armed support and covert assistance into complicated situations that aren't understood. We can't support just ANYBODY simply because he's not a communist.Those prejudices happen to be concordant with my own, but I rebuff sermons from any source. It would have been a better movie if Woods had kept his pie hole closed, if Stone had just SHOWN us Woods' feelings without his having to spell them out as if to a grade school class. However, maybe some viewers needed the message in bold print and, in any case, nobody ever stopped Stone from giving a lecture.Agreeable acting, for the most part. Woods, of course, could hardly fit the role of the reckless manic better. Belushi doesn't have much of a part. That's just as well because the character is a little mushy and appears only sporadically in the second half of the film. Elpidia Carrillo may or may not be a familiar name but people are likely to recognize her face from other appearances. It was generous of the director to give us a brief nude scene. I'd never realized how saucy her bottom was. Cynthia Gibb appears as a cheerful aid or nurse from some charitable organization. She's cute as all get out. No nude scene, though, and when she is raped and murdered along with some nuns, in a scene based on a real incident, it's shocking and painful. How, one asks, is it possible for any man to rape a nun? What kind of man could rape ANY woman? The film isn't without its humorous moments. Aside from Woods and Belushi tooling along in that beat-up Mustang, there is Woods in the confessional for the first time in 33 years. He wants to marry Carrillo and, in the course of doing so, commit bigamy, and Carrillo won't go along with it unless he receives absolution and takes communion first. (It only costs him one Our Father and twelve Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition. Sin seems to be the only thing the price of which has not skyrocketed over the years.) This is one of Stone's more amateurish but less indulgent movies. There's a plot, more or less, some character development, and mostly it rings true. It would be nice if were always able to keep at least one foot in reality and if he were to stop driving everyone crazy with his directorial furbelows.