Sabotage | David Ayer | March 28, 2014
It’s hard to believe that the rather unbearable Sabotage came from the same man who directed last year’s rather underrated End of Watch and the always memorable Training Day. Sabotage is a film that showcases mind-numbing amounts of action and violence, yet somehow finds a way to be a major bore that made its 109 runtime feel like a life sentence.
Sabotage begins with a group of DEA agents who end up stealing $10 million from the cartel after performing a raid. Only, when they go back to retrieve the money, it’s not there. Their supervisor finds out about the missing cash, and soon the group is suspended as they are investigated. Soon enough, one by one, members of the group that participated on the raid get picked off in brutal fashion. They assume it’s the Cartel getting revenge, but soon they realize that it just may be an inside job by one of their own.
The crew is led by Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John Wharton, the leader of the DEA pack. The group is filled out by Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Joe Manganiello, Terrence Howard, Josh Holloway, and Max Martini. A fine an eclectic group of actors, a rather ideal cast for this sort of genre film. Only, you could have cast anyone in their place, because there’s nothing that any of them can do to save the film that’s truly doomed from the start. Arnold is fine in his role, but the rest of the cast is wooden and unremarkable. Even talents such as Enos and Howard are bland and forgettable.
The blame game goes to the top of the chain. The painful script was co-written by David Ayer along with Skip Woods, whose was responsible for last year’s dread-fest A Good Day to Die Hard and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Then things start to make sense (although he did write Swordfish). The script does the cast no favors, hastily thrown together, never quite getting to the point. It likes to think the various “plot twists” that they throw out into the ocean will keep us on our toes, but it just gets derivative. Every character is unlikeable, there isn’t a redeeming trait to be found in any of them. Ayer and Woods try to mask these flaws with mindless violence that has no purpose, or end. Even Michael Bay would have flinched.
If handled correctly, Sabotage could have been the sort of guilty pleasure that Arnold has made a career out of. Instead, it’s a mess of a film that was all brawn no brains, a loud violent film that somehow managed to make me sleepy. Yikes.
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