Movie Review: ‘SABOTAGE’

Writer/director David Ayer knows one thing exceptionally well: corruption.  Through his writing career that’s the one unifying theme, from the cop who lets the crook go in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious  to 2012’s green-lit patrolmen of End of Watch.  With sometimes middling results, and often feeling like a different take on the same characters, Ayer’s made a name for himself as a morally ambiguous lover of justice.  So what could be more in his wheelhouse than an elite D.E.A. team who try to get rich and end up dying trying?  Welcome to Sabotage.

Opening with a raid on some form of a drug compound with a backroom stacked with what looks like a few billion dollars.  What seems an up and up bust ends up being a cover to steal $10 million of the stack to line their pockets and dropped through drain pipes on a rope to be collected covertly later.  The problem is when they go to grab their loot in the sewers, the rope has been cut and the cash is nowhere to be found.  As their team are the only ones aware of the plan it seems fairly obvious that one of their crew has screwed the others, but making matters worse is that investigators for Intenal Affairs discover the missing loot and interrogate the team while also shutting them down for an extended period of time.  Eventually the crew’s leader Breacher (Arnold Schwarzenegger)  gets the team back in the game…but then one by one they start dying in horrible ways reminicent of cartel and gangland style.  Caroline (Olivia Williams) is a homicide detective who ends up entangled  once the deaths of the team members are linked.  If the murders are to be solved, an uneasy alliance between Breacher and Caroline must be made.  Shit gets bad, lots of people die.

If that oversimplified plot breakdown seemed a bit confusing and confounding, that’s because it is.  Convoluted is an understatement here, and there’s a serious disconnect between all the parts that make the whole.  Bad cops doing bad things, missing money, drug lords, torture, betrayal, crossing, double-crossing, a murder mystery, horror movie crime scenes; there’s so much going on and none of it is developed enough to make any one part work well let alone fit together like a puzzle.  The film is like trying to put together three separate puzzles dumped on a table together, you have no picture of the final picture, and with lots of pieces missing.  The editing and pace of the film is severely off, and while I found bits to enjoy I couldn’t think of anything but how disjointed the movie is the whole time.

The cast is well put together and yet none of them outside of Olivia Williams seems to know who their character really is.  I would have loved to see an entire movie with her and her partner played by Harold Perrineau — their chemistry was spot on and their characters seemed instantly recognizable as if they were at one point in the script the lead characters.  Everything honestly would have worked a lot better that way, too, as we know so much more than those detectives do and yet we have no further comprehension of what’s going on.  That’s a serious problem.  Schwarzenegger doesn’t have a clue how to play a morally ambiguous character, and as much as we love to ROOT for Arnold being a bad-ass every time, it’s nearly impossible to do so here with zero charm or charisma involved.  As for this top notch D.E.A. crew, none of them seem good at anything in particular aside from being misogynists and giving each other heaping spoonfuls of shit.  They come off more as a group of former junkies slapped together inexplicably.  Most confusing and bizarre is the lone female on the team played by The Killing’s Mireille Enos,who goes from endearing undercover worker to a wife to a junkie to a psychopath in a very short period of time.  Enos seems to be having a lot of fun the whole time, but instead of owning the character she absolutely buries it in overacting and exaggeration that doesn’t mesh well.  What could have been a stand out character ends up being the one I grew instantly tired of after 30 minutes.  The rest range from “asshole” to “asshole with a conscience.”  It’s pathetic coming from a writer who developed Denzel Washington’s first Oscar for Training Day, as Alonzo was a character so fully drawn, so loveable and hateable at the same time, that he transcends description and becomes an iconic depiction of the law gone wrong.  Ayer’s come close to repeating this greatness a few times with Kurt Russell, Keanu Reeves, and Christian Bale.  Arnold will not be added to this list by any means.

The list of things I disliked about the film is seemingly endless the more I keep thinking about it.  Off the heels of End of Watch, Ayer’s finest hour since Training Day, this follow up is a complete mess that really begs the question “what were you thinking?!”  Is it enjoyable at times?  Sure.  There’s some seriously brutal combat and copious amounts of gore to be found, and Ayer’s trademark vulgarity and lawmen comradery is still on display as well as any other attempt…but none of it redeems what’s so poor.  I really hope Ayer’s done with bad cops for a while, his next film is a WWII film with Brad Pitt which should definitely avoid retread and burnout of the same subject.  There are at least five films on Ayer’s filmography I’d highly recommend over this.  Rent it for a buck if you’re curious, but you’ve been warned.