Review of Sabotage (2014) by Gary Z — 30 May 2015

The revenge flick suggested by the trailers for this turkey may not have been any great shakes, but it would have been a fair sight better than this: a testosterone-fueled bro-fest that skips past unintentional comedy and straight to off-putting.

The film is a mess of narrative -- even when we know what's going on, we have no idea why. Arnie's DEA agent squad members are being picked off one by one, supposedly because they stole millions from a cartel during a drug bust. Except they never stole it, and there's no way their government superiors could accuse them of such since they blew up the bulk of the stash.

David Ayer (whose writing credit for Training Day won't mean jack if he churns out more dreck like this) tries to keep things interesting with overlapping scenes, a lot of gruesome violence and a gutter noir vibe. What he and scriptwriter Skip Woods (responsible for the awful "Good Day to Die Hard") don't do is give us a reason to care for the unsavory grunts being murdered.

But that's not the most aggravating feature of "Sabotage": that distinction goes to its lack of focus. Once Olivia Williams' homicide investigator arrives, the movie becomes rudderless. For a while she becomes the movie's anchor, until we're given another scene of Arnie and his team busting down a drug house. It's so disorienting that there's a perverse inner logic to ending the movie in a Mexican cantina with cowboy-hat-wearing Schwarzenegger chomping on a cigar. Once the wheels come off, you might as well drive off the cliff.