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Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

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Movie Review: ‘Sabotage’

OPEN ROAD FILMS Arnold Schwazenegger stars in yet another action thriller, but the overall film is difficult to take seriously.
OPEN ROAD FILMS
Arnold Schwazenegger stars in yet another action thriller, but the overall film is difficult to take seriously.

★☆☆☆☆

It’s interesting how easy it is to immediately predict the nature of a movie solely from its beginning scenes. Straight away, it was evident that David Ayer’s new action thriller “Sabotage” would be laden with bloody chunks of body remnants, prolonged gun fights, ridiculously cheesy lines, but yet completely bereft of a stable and comprehensible storyline.

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as John “Breacher” Wharton, the leader of an elite DEA team, “Sabotage” illustrates an intriguing, but nonetheless straightforward situation: After the task force puts down a powerful drug cartel while surreptitiously stealing 10 million dollars of the cartel’s cash supply, the DEA members’ bodies begin to pile up one by one. As the individual members delve deeper into the investigation, they realize that the murderer may actually be among them, instilling caution and suspicion within the group.

The agents can be described as a raucous and trashy cluster of individuals, which can easily be inferred simply by observing some of their nicknames: Monster, Sugar, Grinder, Neck and Pyro.

A pleasant aspect of “Sabotage” is its ability to stretch out a fairly simple plotline. In reality, the movie slightly deviates from the trailer and plot description, but I can’t consider that false advertising; everything presented in the trailer and abstract actually happened in the movie, just not the way that I expected. Given the lack of character development, I found it hard to gauge the intentions of each DEA member, which ironically enhanced the suspense of the film — I couldn’t pinpoint the murderer until later on in the movie.

Unfortunately, the suspense and thrill factor was the only positive aspect of “Sabotage.” From the acting and script to the tastelessness and overall monotony of the nonaction scenes, this film was absolutely preposterous.

Schwarzenegger possesses plenty of experience with action flicks, so he excelled in the more belligerent scenes; however, his monotonous and heavily accented tone made the more serious and romantic scenes difficult to watch. Every time he took a momentary break from the action scenes to speak about his tough past or attempt to execute a cheesy motivational speech to his team, I wanted to place the rifle back in his hands.

Throughout the movie, the acting was overdramatized and unconvincing. I think it’s safe to incriminate the writers for this failure, given that Ayer chose to feature pretty experienced actors, such as Terrence Howard (“Hustle & Flow”) and Sam Worthington (“Avatar”).

The film teetered toward the bloodier side of the action flick realm, which explains its R rating. The bloodbath isn’t necessarily a distraction, the movie still did feature some outrageous displays of murders. I wouldn’t recommend this type of action film for those who would not be comfortable with seeing a body attached to a ceiling by a perimeter of nails.

Although there were enough plot twists to keep the audience guessing about the identity of the real culprit, “Sabotage” would have been stronger with more effortless and fluid screen writing. Though the comedic barbs and one-liners made the audience laugh, so did the moments that were intended to be more serious and profound. The film was fairly entertaining, but overall, very frustrating to watch.

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