Sabotage

I have no problem with violent movies, and have enjoyed a great many of them.  But Sabotage is not merely a violent movie.  It is an ugly, mean-spirited, abrasive and grimy one.  It made me feel uncomfortable watching it.  It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a depressed and violent DEA agent who leads a team so unlikable and so completely lacking in charm and personalities, calling them antiheroes would be an understatement.  Even worse, the script has no idea what it thinks of these people.  They're just deplorable people doing disgusting things, and the movie has nothing to say about it.

Schwarzenegger is John "Breacher" Wharton, a DEA agent with a reputation for getting the job done when it comes to dealing with drug dealers.  He storms in with his team, made up of young, violent, drug-snorting sociopaths, and pretty much shoot everyone in sight.  When he's not shooting up violent scumbags, he sits in his large home, tormented over the loss of his wife and teenage son one year ago, when they were captured, tortured and murdered by a crime kingpin.  In the film's opening scene, John is watching a snuff film the kingpin sent him of his wife being killed.  Not only does John watch these images over and over again, but the movie forces us to watch them, too.  If this plot point and these violent images had led to some kind of character development for John, that might have been something.  But, the whole idea of John seeking revenge for the death of his family seems like an afterthought, and the movie forgets about it for long periods of time.

Early on, John and his team raid the mansion of a drug lord, killing everyone inside.  Here, we're introduced to John's team, or at least we learn their names, since really that's all that separates them.  They all refer to each other by nicknames like "Pyro", "Grinder", "Tripod" and "Sugar".  Since the team members are more or less interchangeable, that's all we remember about them.  After all the bad guys are dead, John's team decide to help themselves to $10 million they find stashed away in a secret room of the mansion.  They hide it down a sewer pipe, but when they go back later to collect it, the money is gone.  There is an investigation into the team, and whether or not they did steal money from the drug compound, but the charges are dropped quickly, and John and the rest of his men are back to work in no time.

That's when certain members of John's team start turning up dead in various gruesome and graphic ways.  One finds the R.V. he lives in placed on the railroad tracks, another is mutilated and stuck to the ceiling, yet another is mutilated and stuffed in a refrigerator...You get the idea.  Not only do we get to see the finer details of the murder scenes, with various internal organs tossed about the crime area, but the movie usually treats us further by allowing us to watch the autopsy afterward.  The only good thing about these murders is that they bring about the film's one interesting character, a homicide investigator named Caroline (Olivia Williams).  I liked her character, but couldn't help but feel I would have liked her even more if she was being used in a better movie.  Preferably one that doesn't force her to have sex with Schwarzenegger's character at one point, even though the two have absolutely nothing in common, and little chemistry together.

So, Sabotage is ultimately a murder mystery, and not a very good one.  I was able to guess the identity of the killer by using a handy little trick that has gotten me through many a mediocre mystery - Just look for the recognizable actor who's stuck in a role that seems to have absolutely nothing to do with anything, or is given so little to do in the script, you wonder why the actor would even take the role in the first place.  The answer, of course, is that this character is the killer.  Why else would the movie not be drawing attention to them, and why would a recognizable actor take what is obviously a worthless role unless it was going to turn out they are the killer at the end?  Even when the truth is finally revealed, audiences are likely to greet it with a dismissive shrug, as the outcome isn't that thrilling to begin with.

There is no art, style or wit on display here.  It is simply a gruesome endurance test designed to see how many images of splattered brains, spilled intestines and other internal organs you can stomach before you want to get out of your seat and walk out of the theater.  The film's director is David Ayer, whose last film was the amazing End of Watch, a gritty and violent cop drama that was actually about something, and had characters we could get behind.  His script here, which he co-wrote with Skip Woods (A Good Day to Die Hard), reads like it had every last shred of humanity removed from it.  Not only do these characters not resemble real people, they don't even talk like them.  These characters use a certain four letter word with such incessant frequency, it doesn't even sound like dialogue anymore.

Sabotage is a gutless piece of junk that ended up boring me the more it tried to shock me with its violence.  Funny how that is.  The more desperately a movie comes across in its efforts of trying to shock you, the more...well, desperate it often comes across.

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