Salvador   ★★★★
PUT Oliver Stone and James Woods together for the same film and there is no guarantee what the result will be.

It’s happened three times to date – the sports drama Any Given Sunday, the biopic Nixon and Salvador, the only one of Stone’s films in which Woods has played the lead role.

Salvador, released in 1986, is a flawed classic; an angry statement on the dirty side of America’s international politics that leaves a trail of long-lasting destruction and doesn’t take any prisoners

At times the film is wildly uneven and almost out of control, much like Woods’ central character, while at other times incredibly emotional and devastating in its depiction of inhumanity on the largest of scales.

Former Vietnam War veteran Stone was just starting to work in film and had made a handful of features to this date. Salvador was his angry, impassioned public statement on war and politics that also became his entry to Hollywood and a career that has produced some of the most intelligent and thought-provoking dramas on American identity, including Snowden, W, Nixon, JFK and Natural Born Killers.

Woods was the perfect person to play Salvador’s incendiary anti-hero, the flawed, drugged-up real-life war correspondent Richard Boyle who helped expose the dark underbelly of America’s financing of another country’s political upheaval and the resulting death and sorrow.

The American actor was at the height of his powers and an electric screen presence, here rolling all the craziness, duplicity and emotion of the events into one character who delivers Stone’s impassioned criticism with manic intensity.

Boyle is journalistic witness to significant moments of the conflict, including the rape and murder of four American Catholic nuns and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero.

Among the other witnesses to the madness are Boyle’s friend Doctor Rock, an out-of-work disc jockey played by Jim Belushi, and the great John savage as fellow photo-journalist John Cassady.

In keeping with the entire film experience, Salvador flopped at the box office but was critically praised, including gaining several Oscar nominations.

Flawed work by talents like Stone and Woods is still better and more intellectually rewarding than much of today’s cinema.