No stars (turkey). Rating: Rated R, for strong bloody violence and gore, relentless profanity, nudity, drug use and sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.28.14
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Once upon a time, in the 1980s
and early ’90s, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger vied for the crown
of box-office action champ: the former riding the momentum of his Rocky and Rambo franchises; the latter embracing a string of solid sci-fi/fantasy
entries such as Conan the Barbarian, Predator and — needless to say — The
Terminator.
Now they’re in a race to the
bottom.
I was astonished — and saddened —
when Stallone popped up about a year ago, in the loathsome Bullet to the Head. Exiting that bit of distasteful junk, I couldn’t imagine any (former)
big-name star doing worse.
Color me surprised, because along
comes Schwarzenegger and this repugnant turkey.
Back in the day, you’d have had
to stay up late on a Friday night — at home — to see this sort of grade-Z
shoot-’em-up on Cinemax. No self-respecting actor would have signed on for such
grindhouse trash, and no self-respecting studio would have dared release such a
thing theatrically.
My, how times have changed.
Sabotage isn’t merely
offensively, viciously, gratuitously violent; it’s also stupid beyond measure.
Director David Ayer has made a
minor splash with gritty urban thrillers such as Harsh Times and Street
Kings — don’t feel bad, if they escaped your notice — but his primary
Hollywood rep results from his impressive one-two punch as a writer, in 2001:
collaborating on The Fast and the Furious, and as sole scripter on Training
Day, which brought Denzel Washington an Academy Award.
Based on his subsequent career,
Ayer has been chasing the belief that amorality for its own sake is what sells
in these United States. Why bother with plot or character, when one can wallow
in the sleaze of ghastly depravity?
He has teamed here with co-writer
Skip Woods, who also made some noise in 2001, with the stylishly nasty Swordfish, and more recently got involved with glossy action junk such as The A-Team and A Good Day to Die Hard. Nothing to brag about, to be sure,
but also nothing to be ashamed of. Until now.
Based on this result, Woods and
Ayer clearly bring out the worst in each other ... and given the degree to
which the latter already had been plumbing sewer depths, that’s saying a lot.
They unapologetically display
their nauseating sensibilities from the first frame here, as we watch a woman
being brutalized and maimed. (Bang’s 17th Law: No movie that opens with the
torture of a defenseless woman ever amounts to anything.) Turns out this is a
video clip being viewed, likely for the umpteenth time, by an emotionless John
“Breacher” Wharton (Schwarzenegger).
Enjoy that stoic look, because
“emotionless” is all we get out of Schwarzenegger during this entire film.
Breacher heads an elite DEA task
force that has earned an impressive reputation for taking on, and bringing
down, the worst of the baddest drug cartel heavyweights. We’re told this fact,
but reconciling such information with this squad’s on-screen behavior brings
new meaning to concept of narrative oxymoronism.
These squabbling, temper-prone,
third-grade dropouts couldn’t tackle a troop of girl scouts without shooting
each other and killing half a dozen civilians as a bonus. Somewhere along the
line, Ayer and Woods confused good-natured macho bonding with sociopathic
instability.
When these wild ’n’ crazy kids
aren’t busy killing folks or screaming at each other, they gulp shots at the
local strip club, so that Ayer can inject the obligatory quota of bared boobs.
Borrowing an increasingly
tiresome action genre cliché, these guys are known solely by their dumb
nicknames: Monster (Sam Worthington), Grinder (Joe Manganiello), Sugar
(Terrence Howard), Neck (Josh Holloway), Tripod (Kevin Vance), Pyro (Max
Martini) and Smoke (Mark Schlegel). A few of these monikers relate vaguely to
their respective talents, as with Pyro, but we’re left wondering precisely what
“Neck” and “Tripod” might suggest.
That’s it for characterization,
by the way.
The squad’s toughest and nastiest
member, however, is Lizzy (Mireille Enos), a trash-talking bee-yatch who can
out-drink, out-fight, out-curse, out-shoot and out — well, no, this is a family
publication — any of her male comrades. So she claims. Stray scenes of Enos
sweating through exercises can’t obscure the fact that any one of these guys
could snap her 5-foot-2 frame like a twig. But hey: That’s Hollywood, right?
Lizzy also happens to be a junkie
who gleefully samples the narco spoils discovered by Breacher’s team; at one
point, she even chugs a liberal dose of liquid meth. Hell, yeah; That's a woman
I’d want on my cop squad.
But their behavior doesn’t
actually matter in the usual sense, because this narrative opens as the squad
takes down yet another nest of nameless, faceless drug smugglers — and
“faceless” is the operative term, since most of these thugs get their heads
blown off — and then steal $10 million from this cartel safe house’s massive
stash of cash. Yep, our so-called good guys (and gal) actually are corrupt to
the core.
Having cleverly snitched the
aforementioned sum, hiding it for later retrieval, Wharton then blows up the
rest of the cartel loot with a well-placed bomb.
Pay attention, now: Wharton and
his team subsequently get brought up on charges by the DEA, for having stolen
that money. Wharton’s previously shining reputation (seriously? leading that
motley crew?) goes into the toilet, and his comrades get suspended.
But ... but ... if the entire
world believes that all the money blew up in the safe house, what would make
the DEA think that Wharton’s squad stole even one dollar, let alone 10 million?
Yep, we’re dealing here with a
classic example of the idiot script, where each and every character behaves
like an idiot at all times, and the idiot writers can’t even be bothered to
remain consistent to their own wafer-thin premise.
This hiccup aside, the cartel in
question is understandably vexed by the (apparent) total loss of its loot. No
surprise, then, when members of Breacher’s squad start getting assassinated,
one by one. Nor are these simple, bullet-to-the-brain executions; oh, no. Ayer
lovingly wallows in contrived, complicated murders swiped from torture-porn
franchises such as Saw, Final Destination and — reaching back — Friday the
13th.
So we don’t simply see one poor
guy check out when his trailer home gets parked on a track in front of an
approaching train; we also witness the body-mangling impact — in slow motion —
and then, later, watch cops and FBI agents tag stray limbs, gristle and organs.
The low point, though, comes when
gritty investigator Caroline Brentwood (Olivia Williams) — searching the home
of another of Breacher’s squad, late at night — slips and falls into the pool
of blood beneath the next victim, who has been nailed to the ceiling above,
entrails hanging from the gaping chest cavity.
(We can idly wonder how anything
less than four or five killers, working in concert, could have managed such a
trick.)
Arnie, Arnie, Arnie. Have you no
shame?
By now you must’ve gotten the
message: This is grotesque, lowest-common-denominator garbage of the worst
sort.
Perhaps making up for
Schwarzenegger’s impassivity, the rest of the cast over-acts to a ludicrous
extreme; Ayer apparently believes that shouting and finger-pointing are the
height of thespic subtlety. Enos, perhaps recognized from TV’s The Killing, is by far the worst: Even given that she’s playing a drug addict, her
shrieking, gibbering “emoting” is the stuff of Golden Raspberry Award legend.
And I’m sure this film will
gallop home with at least a dozen Razzie nominations, come early 2015.
In fairness, Williams’ Brentwood
is a genuinely interesting character; the same can be said of Harold Perrineau,
who plays her partner, Jackson. Williams and Perrineau obviously know how to
act persuasively, in spite of Ayer’s ham-handed interference, and their
characters clearly wandered in from some better, smarter movie.
That is, until Williams bares her
boobs during a late-night swim, and then falls into Schwarzenegger’s arms in
the most contrived kiss I’ve seen in decades. The best actors in the world
couldn’t have saved that scene; even Tuesday evening’s rowdy preview crowd
booed and jeered.
Ultimately, despite pretentions
toward “originality,” Ayer and Woods have unleashed little beyond the
big-screen equivalent of a particularly violent, first-person-shooter video
game. And, as if to cement that thought, cinematographer Bruce McCleery even
tosses in an unintentionally hilarious, rotating, looking-into-the-gun-barrel,
point-of-view shot.
I’d have tossed up my hands at
that point, but I’d already worn out my shoulders half an hour earlier.
This is contemptible, unpardonable
rubbish of the worst sort: the type of swill that makes one fear for the future
of Western civilization.
I’d hate to think Stallone would
regard this as some sort of challenge, and I’d further hate to think that
anybody Out There could write and direct something even worse.
But, as Bill Cosby has said,
Never tempt “worse.”
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