Review of Sabotage (2014) by Greg B — 30 Mar 2014

I feel really bad for giving this movie a bad review because Arnold Schwarzenegger actually played a really good part in this movie, it was actually one of his better performances, but unfortunately this movie Sabotage just sucked.

David Ayer directed this film and ever since he did the movie End of Watch I've been looking forward to seeing what he was going to do next. Who would've thought that the guy who wrote Training Day and directed End of Watch would make a movie this terrible! I saw the previews and this movie didn't look great, but it looked entertaining and honestly that's all this movie had to do is just entertain me, even if it was mindless entertainment, its still entertainment.

Sure I've complained a bunch of times that mindless entertainment is ridicules, but mindless entertainment is still better than no entertainment at all and that's what I got from this movie Sabotage.

I can see David Ayer at times was trying to make this movie realistic and even dark at times, but since the script was so sloppy and the characters were so unlikeable it just didn't work out that way.

This film was written by Skip Woods, who's written other terrible action movies, like Hitman, X-Men Origins - Wolverine and A Good Day to Die Hard. The reason why Skip Woods is such a bad writer is because he has no idea how to write interesting characters because pretty much all the characters he writes in his movies are either bland or unlikeable.

He also writes a lot of cheesy dialogue in his movies and he always tries to make his movies dark, but they always end up being goofy and over the top. Thankfully this movie did have David Ayer in the directing chair; sure he couldn't save the movie from sucking, but he did save the movie from being a total train wreck.

Arnold Schwarzenegger also saved this movie from being a train wreck because his performance in this movie was really well done. His character in the film was a poorly written character and if anyone else would've played this character it would've been terrible to watch, but thanks to Arnold's compelling performance he made the character work.

I know Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the greatest actor out there, but he can still act and this movie proves that. Now as for the supporting cast members, they were all terrible! Sam Worthington was terrible, Terrence Howard was terrible, Josh Holloway was terrible, Joe Manganiello was terrible and Mireille Enos probably gave the worst performance out of every body.

All of them played such unlikeable characters and there was no chemistry between any of them. You see this is a movie about a DEA task force, so I was expecting a good team that has good chemistry with each other, like the team from Predator, but instead this team was filled with boring and unlikeable people.

Like I said, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the only actor that did a good job and he was the only character in the film that I gave a shit about. Now what about the action? This movie is an action film, so it had to have some good action in it right? Well.

.. sort of, I guess! The action in this movie was fine and people who love bloody violence will probably get a kick out of it, but for me I wasn't into it. I'm not against bloody violence because I like a lot of movies that have a lot of gore and violence, but in those movies I like the gore and violence because it makes sense.

You see in this movie the bloody violence doesn't really make sense because they just put graphic violence in it just to have graphic violence. You use graphic violence to help show realism in a movie, or you use it to make the movie more thrilling, or you use it to make the movie more creative.

In this movie they used so much blood and guts throughout the whole damn thing that it just seemed unnecessary. I felt like they wanted the movie to look cool, so they just put a lot of violent action scenes in it and I guess they prayed people would lose site of the fact that this movie is just pointless.

Sabotage is a messy, uncreative action movie that I wished was directed by another director. I still enjoy David Ayer and I still enjoy Arnold Schwarzenegger and as painful as this movie was to watch I'm still a fan of them.