Review: “Sabotage”

David Ayer is a tasteless filmmaker. When he started his career as the screenwriter for such hits like Training Day and The Fast and the Furious, he had the benefit of filmmakers who knew how to incorporate gritty, over-the-top violence in ways that were emotionally raw, in Training Day’s case, or zanily pulpy, in Fast and Furious’. Behind the camera as a director, however, Ayer seems to have no control, relishing in bloody, bombastic shootouts that overshadow any sense of plot, pace, or character development. Senseless violence on screen has always been a hot button issue and Ayer seems to be its biggest proponent. Unfortunately and unsettlingly, his latest, Sabotage, a DEA actioner starring an aged Arnold Schwarzenegger, is as tasteless as filmmaking gets. Honestly, it’s downright disturbing.

Schwarzenegger stars as John “Breacher” Wharton, the hard-ass commander of an elite DEA squad whose nickname is “the drunk king” due to his lofty track record of taking down big drug operations and cartels. As the film opens, Breacher and his skilled team – Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Terrence Howard, Josh Holloway, Max Martini, and Joe Manganiello – are carrying out their latest bust, which contains a head exploding shoot-out and a shady climax in which the team decides to steal $10 million of the cartel’s bounty. The money eventually goes missing, leaving the squad with nothing but questions from the DEA over how $10 million of drug money could disappear in thin air. Then, to make matters worse, members of the squad begin to be killed off in brutal, stomach-curdling fashion, prompting Breacher and his team to hunt for the murderer before they all end up pinned to their ceilings with their stomachs ripped open and their intestines dangling to the floor.

Yes, that’s an actual visual in the film, one of many violent images that are as gratuitous as filmmaking gets. Shooting with the same on-the-ground, handheld wannabe intensity of his other films Harsh Times, Street Kings, and End Of Watch, Ayer tries to make his action sequences explode with visceral emotion, but he comes off more as a cheap, poor man’s Paul Greengrass or Kathryn Bigelow. It’s hard to make any action visceral when the characters involved are lacking any unique qualities or chemistry and that’s Sabotage’s biggest problem.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Ayers’ last film, End Of Watch, but even with all its found footage format problems and nonsensical violence, the film had some dynamic chemistry between leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena that gave even the most ridiculous action set piece a sense of emotional urgency. Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor is another great example, where some pretty grotesque violence is eased by a focus on the characters and their resilient bond with one another. In Sabotage, all of the characters are so sleazy and despicable, like immature hillbillies and drug addicts with big guns, that there’s no camaraderie among them to make it even remotely plausible that they could all come together and be a great squad. All of Ayers’ films focus on themes of brotherhood but in Sabotage there’s no such thing. Unless you call getting together to drink beer and severely objectify the only female member of the group “brotherhood”.

This is inarguably a low point for all the actors involved, none of who make any sort of impression to even make you remember their characters’ names. Enos, in particular, is so retched as the group’s slimy, drug addicted loose cannon that it might just be the worst on screen performance this side of Cameron Diaz in The Counselor. Even the great Olivia Williams, playing against type as an Austin homicide detective investigating the increasing murders of the DEA unit, gets bogged down in this mess, her role eventually undermined by late-in-the-game plot twists that make absolutely no sense and end the picture on a confoundingly absurdist note. What’s left are over a dozen extremely violent shootouts, the kinds where blood splatters like fireworks and people die in savage ways. The image of one squad member stuffed in his fridge as he bleeds out is particulary nauseating. All of this could be somewhat forgiven if there was any inch of character development among the group, but without any emotional connections to these characters these action sequences exist merely to shock and it’s offensively gratuitous.

After Sabotage, Ayer might be my least favorite working director, though his next project, the WWII-set Fury, starring Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, and Shia LaBeouf, might be a redeemable one since a group of American soldiers will instantly add some pathos to his violent proceedings a la the aforementioned Lone Survivor. While some action junkies are bound to eat this up, I’d stay far away from Sabotage if I were you.

2/10

Review by Zack Sharf