Review of Sabotage (2014) by Daniel V — 14 Sep 2014

What a friggin waste. Seriously. A story of a group of DEA agents who steal money from a drug lord and then they start dying one by one. First off, this a who's who of 2nd tier action stars. Arnie's mini-expendables if you will.

I mean it's got Two terminators(Arnold & Sam Worthington), the original War Machine(Terrance Howard), Sawyer from Lost(Josh Holloway), and a man who was almost Superman(Joe Manganiello). It's also directed by the dude that wrote Training Day and directed End of Watch(David Ayer) so I was excited that Arnold finally got some legit filmmaking behind one of his Post-Political roles and because of that, this is Arnold's best Post-Governator performance.

That's about the only positive. The movie starts out interesting albeit a bit standard but that doesn't bug me that much what bugs me is when the twists are easily seen coming and are a bit much.

Why writer's think you need more than one, even TWO twists, I do not understand. You are out-clevering yourself. When the agents start dying off one by one it becomes clear that someone within the group is behind the murders.

This is where I started getting bored and started playing NBA 2K14 during the movie. I still finished it and let me tell you when they first reveal who it is, I was glad because I hated that character when they were supposed to be good.

But I also saw it coming, they didn't hide it very well. Another thing I do not understand is why more gore and more violent violence is necessary to be more "real"? The deaths here, the aftermaths at least, feel like they belong in Torture Porn directed by Eli Roth or the 18 different Saw directors.

The fact that these people seem to be family and yet one them is cruelly killing off all the others is brutal enough, we don't need to see guts hanging from the ceiling. All in all, pretty disappointed with this effort because it could have been something special.

It gets 2 for Arnold, because he really was quite good.