New To Blu: Sabotage

Arnold said he'd be back. And he is.

"Call me Jurgen Prochnow again
and I will crush your girly face."

Just when you think Arnold Schwarzenegger's desire to rekindle the '80s action film couldn't get any worse, you end up getting Sabotage; a film so bad it wastes an epic cast on a predictably abysmal plot and bores audiences with routine action sequences based on flawed and unrelentingly awful camera work. Honestly though, when you have Olivia Williams, Terrence Howard, Josh Holloway, Mireille Enos, Sam Worthington, and Harold Perrineau but can't draw one line of believable dialogue from any of them, you might as well hang it up. Your movie sucks.

It's been a rough ride for Arnold ever since he decided to make the transition back from politics to movies. Other than his nearly spectacular retro team up with Stallone on Escape Plan, every project has been an ill advised retread of everything he's done before. And Sabotage is no different. The dialogue is flat and wooden. The action sequences are tired looking and unrealistic. And the plot, (what there is of one) is so terribly thin, I could cut it with a plastic butter knife.

"Stop calling me old. After all, I
don't make fun of True Blood."

Admittedly,  these types of Arnold movies have never been high art or revealing character studies, but at least they maintained some grit and a twisted sense of humor. There lies the problem with Sabotage. It tries very hard to give us an edgy action/crime flick about a brotherhood of white trash DEA agents, but it fails miserably at every single turn. And the only humor to be found comes at the expense of audiences trying to keep a straight face during lines like, "Some of us are getting paid. The rest of us are just getting dead". Please. Who writes this crap? And better yet, who the hell funded this tragedy?

At the onset of the marketing campaign, my hopes were high that Schwarzenegger was finally going to make a good old school eighties shoot 'em up movie again. After the sickeningly stupid The Last Stand and his needless Expendables cameos, Sabotage could have been a return to form for the one time king of action cinema.

If the story had been more fleshed out and if the director, David Ayers, had paid one ounce of attention to how horrendously cheesy and one sided these performances were, he might have had a chance to rekindle the meandering career of this muscle bound senior citizen. Don't waste your time with Sabotage. It's almost worse than the Expendables movies.


-Chris George