Sabotage (2014)

Sabotage (R) - Review

"Get to da flop-pa!"

A DEA special forces team under the leadership of a distraught veteran rob some drug lords of 10 million dollars in a bloody bust, and are immediately double crossed.  Six months later and their suspension over, the members are slowly dying off, one by one.  Is it the money, is it the cartels, or is it someone within the group of  violent sociopaths cloaked in authority?  For Writer/Director David Ayer (scripter of the great Training Day and director of 2014's iffy Fury) Sabotage may live up to it's name, for his career at least.

And speaking of name, once the credits roll you may ask yourself what the film's title even means, or how it relates to story.  And its a story that is so mean and nasty, so edgy but over the top "realistic" that it's general aura is as pleasant to watch as a grisly two dollar steak aging on the windowsill for a week.  It's like Ayer and co-writer Scott Wood (whose screenwriting credits list many terrible mistakes like Wolverine: Origins) had lost a bet and had to translate TVs The Shield bad/good cop routine for the big screen.  Except now with dripping guts and exposed strippers and enough Fbombs dropped to make the Anola Gay blush.  Every woman is an edgy bad-ass power femme, every man has a PTSD loaded machine rifle and facial hair, every conversation is dingy curse-laden repartee that is as repetitive and gross as the exploitative violence.  The filmmakers must have been brain damaged by all the squibs going off to expect the audience to embrace this team of psychotic tattooed criminals with badges when literally the entire country is concerned with the militarization of the police and their relation to the armed authority.  Perhaps they thought their aging star would take the curse off it.

Arnold however comes with his own cinematic baggage.  A lifetime of action movies, which often invented the same tropes that Sabotage tries to emulate, lays on Arnie's face, and you can't blame him for taking the role of DEA legend Breacher on.  The actor has so many cheesy 80s 90s action vehicles under his belt that he is impossible to take seriously.  They literally give him my late-Grandpa's haircut but avoid all the snide old jokes that we kind of smirked through in 2013's The Last Stand.  Still Breacher's character arc couldn't have been telegraphed any better had it been transmitted by Samuel Morse himself, but then the producer's obviously got cold feet and recut the film's ending so that it's more of a traditional Arnold part, a schizophrenic decision that leaves the editing janky and build-up of tone all for nothing.  Your own imagination might try to over complicate the plot of this almost 2 hour slog, but no this one is just going through the tough guys n girls cliches with nary a "good time tonight".  It's all digital sprays of blood and curses, quarterbacked by a near-octogenarian who can barely move and whose character has almost no backstory to account for his Austrian presence in rural Georgia, not that any of the cast gets any kind of motivation beyond "we are generally unpleasant and have no regard for human life".

The whole film smacks of wasted energy.  The plot and cinematic style screams late Tony Scott (the unwise Domino comes to mind) filled with green lights and spent shells.  Missing is his driving sense of violent energy and stylish action, for Sabotage is just bullet snaps and soggy quips.  The ensemble cast reminds of a squad of malcontents under fire ala Black Hawk Down, but woefully underuses it's talent.   For instance Terrance Howard must have been edited completely out, his screen time is so minuscule and is used and abused by the plot like yesterday's wet naps, no way would he have agreed to this part as is on screen, and the rest of the cast fares no better.  An entire hour was purportedly sliced from the film for which I must heartily congratulate some nameless studio suit for reducing my exposure to this film's noxious aroma.  In no way did this dud need more side stories, more cop talk or a surprise twist at the end that was already boringly obvious.

The film is a dirty stinking mess either way, and that ending, ugh.  It just keeps going through its murderous motions all the while smugly asking you out of the corner of its gleefully puling mouth "isn't this great?"  It's the face of a movie that you'd just like to punch.  Hard.

2 He Didn't Say He'll Be Back, But We Know He Will out of 10 (AWFUL)