They don’t make’em like Sabotage anymore. David Ayer’s film is a hard-R, grimy, rub-your-nose-in-the-filth-of-humanity kind of movie that, I have to imagine, is going to appeal to a fairly narrow group of people. Or what do I know? Maybe it’ll be Arnold’s biggest hit in a decade. It is probably his most interesting role in several decades, I just wish it all came together as a total package.
Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John “Breacher” Wharton, a legendary DEA agent with a team of hardcore young undercover enforcers who are, uniformly, terrible human beings. But we know they are crazy-tough because they swear a WHOLE lot and all have tattoos and drinking problems. The movie starts off energetically enough, with an enormous drug bust in which we’re clearly shown that Breacher’s team is hardcore, and that they are stealing money and therefore playing dirty. Body parts are blown all over the place and you get a sense that this movie is going to go down hard.
The only problem is how forced it all feels from the outset. Breacher’s team includes a shaved-headed Sam Worthington (“Monster”), a corn-rowed mountain of man-flesh called “Grinder” (Joe Manganiello), Terrence Howard as “Sugar”, and a few others including Josh Holloway and Max Martini. But the toughest of them all is Lizzy, Mireille Enos, and again… we know this because she parties the hardest, has the dirtiest mouth, and is hyper-agressively-sexual. I have no real problem with tough-guy characters, or a team of them all together. (That’s kind of my favorite, in fact). But when the team is under scrutiny and off duty for months for the suspected theft of the money (which disappeared without a trace and will stay hidden as one of the central mysteries of the film), they all hang out together in some kind of crazy DEA clubhouse and tattoo each other and play video games and swear a lot. And all of this felt extremely forced. For whatever reason I kept seeing right past the tattoos and cornrows and shaved heads and just kept seeing a bunch of actors playing at being tough.
Arnold actually does pretty well as the father-figure and central character of the show. After the money disappears and the initial investigation dies down, our team is reinstated and soon after that, they begin turning up dead, one-by-one. It takes a long time for this plot element to kick in, but for the most part Sabotage is a bloody, cops and robbers mystery. Who took the money? Who is killing who? And solving the mystery appears to be up to investigating officer “Caroline”, played by a committed Olivia Williams. Williams and Enos actually have the two meatiest roles outside of Arnold’s, but their high profiles in the film are hidden by marketing focused on a bunch of mean-looking dudes. Arnold plays the unreliable host to Caroline as she begins digging into the deaths. Nobody wants to be next to die, but nobody wants to cop to having stolen a bunch of cartel drug money, either.
Screenwriters Skip Woods and David Ayer really do seem to have a point to all of the goings on of Sabotage. They set up a harsh world at the outset, even if it feels a bit forced, and then they follow through on that set up, leading us through a story riddled with death, deceit, drunkenness, and out-right dehumanization. Arnold’s character Breacher has a past so dark you’ll wince when it is revealed in gory detail on screen for you. You can tell from the outset that this film isn’t going to lead to good places where all is rosy in the world. I think beneath the intrigue and plotting of this tale, Woods and Ayer are attempting to expose the brokenness of the entire war on drugs and all the systems that are set up around it. No one is clean, and there is no end in sight. As things stand, the drug trade is spiraling out of control and deep-cover agents are living in a wild west where goodness is no longer an option. Maybe on a wider scale Sabotage is indicting our entire western culture, suggesting we might all be complicit in a system designed to wear us down, break us, and bleed us dry. However far you care to take the implications of the film, Woods and Ayer are not interested in telling an uplifting tale. While Sabotage maintains a consistent worldview throughout, it isn’t a worldview that feels like a “good time at the movies”.
And I have to respect that. I won’t dig into the solving of the central mysteries at all, and the less you know about the story beyond the initial set up, the better it will be for you who love to try to solve the mystery as it plays out. But I will say that the direction it all goes in is so dank and musty, digging into dark corners of the soul, that the idea that this movie has some serious balls to it isn’t really a matter of discussion. This is a bold, narrow, rare vision of a soulless and corrupt world.
I just wish all that gravitas didn’t collapse under the poor execution of the central mystery. This is one of those films where, upon post-screening inspection, it is hard to actually figure out what did happen, who committed what crime, and what all the different motivations were. Sure, you could attribute some of that stuff to “user error” (IE, I’m just not smart enough to figure it all out), but in reality the various character motivations and plots and schemes don’t hold up because they are thin and simply collapse under scrutiny. Overall, Sabotage just works better as an exercise in bleak worldview and further evidence of the lost drug war than as an entertaining mystery that keeps you guessing.
I want to see Arnold Schwarzenegger take on more roles like this one. Breacher is complicated, intelligent, ruthless, and there is nary a one-liner in sight. Here he attempts to actually play a character, doing his best to disappear into the role with tattoos and a distinct (and totally slick) haircut. He doesn’t succeed at disappearing into the role. But that doesn’t really matter at this point. Arnold is Arnold, after all. The smart move on he and Ayer’s part was to do away with anything self-referential. There are no “old jokes”, Breacher is just a legendary cop pushing retirement. There are no catch phrases or audience-winks. Breacher is exactly the type of role Arnold should be taking on these days, and the ultimate success of the product may not be a homerun, but I’d rather see a hero like this age on screen with films that have something to say to us today than simply watch a series of callbacks to what came before with a knowing wink.
I walked out of Sabotage in a bit of a daze. The film affects you. You can’t walk away from it feeling entirely clean; it won’t allow that. And that means the film has some power. Though while Sabotage has meat on its bones, the central mystery collapses under that weight and leaves exposed a skeleton of mostly paper-thin characters and plot points. You get a whole lot of devil, and to hell with the details.
And I’m Out.