Members of an elite DEA task force find themselves being taken down one by one after they rob a drug cartel safe house.
A bloody, scuzzy, progressively preposterous whodunnit, blending old school and new wave to neutering effect. One chunky plus: the all-new Antihero Arnie.
This is ugly, unpleasant filmmaking.
Sabotage boils down to a junky, hyperviolent Agatha Christie, where Arnie’s team are bumped off at regular intervals, while detective Olivia Williams tries to find out whodunnit. As an aside, Sabotage is also a film that happily lingers on extremely graphic disembowelments, yet can’t get out of the room fast enough when Arnie is about to have sex.
An ageing Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘does a Clint’ and allows mortality to creep up… while still kicking inordinate amounts of ass. Get to the chopper and instruct the pilot to head for the nearest cinema for a bruising, blistering ride.
Alas there’s nothing else at stake beyond the lives of these vile agents who revel in their own misogyny and violence.
Sabotage is at least a mild improvement on Escape Plan.
Audiences will surely view this as a missed opportunity, especially since the whole endeavour fails to stand up to much scrutiny. It’s a case of a decent premise sabotaged by its own absurdities.
Schwarzenegger should stick to what he does best – playing wisecracking tough guys.
Consequently, when the big action showdown does arrive, Ayer’s striving-for-authenticity shooting style is too much at odds with the film’s kill-crazy insouciance to enable us to take any (guilty) pleasure from the ensuing mayhem. A nonsensical, neo-western coda, meanwhile, feels tacked on and makes a further mockery of the preceding action.
Scenes of people kicking doors down and shooting each other in the head are efficiently handled – it's everything else that's a problem.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
RSS feed of Cinema reviews