Yeah I know, it’s weird I’m writing about Sabotage, a super-mainstream movie directed by David Ayer and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I understand if you turn away and do something else instead of reading this. But Sabotage has something, something that tickles my imagination. One this is true though, I lost interest in Arnold the same second he turned his career towards politics. I can buy he’s a republican (many of these old farts are) and he’s gay-friendly, but there’s a huge difference between killing people on film and for real, like Arnold have done by approving death sentences - one of the biggest signs you’re a primitive human being. I don’t care if that was his job, but if he was so powerful he wouldn’t have done it at all.
So fuck Arnold. Now he’s out of the politics and I’m trying, slowly, to see if I can appreciate his work. I was mildly entertained by The Expendables, part 2 had a good beginning but sucked… and part 3, well, I just ignored it and watched The Asylum’s Mercenaries instead - a lot better and less conservative and more intelligent.
Arnold is Breacher, the leader of a DEA task force who decides to steal 10 million dollars from a drug cartel. They blow the rest of the money to smithereens, but then discovers someone have taken the millions they stole...who? The drug cartel? One in the team? Soon they find themselves in really big danger when someone starts to kill them off one by one, in gory, graphic fashion!
The story goes Sabotage had a really difficult way to the big screen. The original cut is said to have been close to three hours long, focusing more on the mystery and whodunit-aspect of the story, with a different ending. The studio thought it was too little action and too much downbeat drama and ordered reshoots to make it more commercial. Didn’t help, it still bombed at the box office. I’m pretty sure it would have attracted a bigger audience and gotten better reviews if they kept it the original way. Reshoots aside, it’s still - believe it or not - a good, close to great movie. There’s several reasons for this, but lets start with the flawed characters.
I love not-so-perfect humans on the big screen. Perfect, super-action-macho-men, bores me to death. In Sabotage there’s not one single perfect human being. Everyone is very quite sad, broken, humiliated and paranoid. It’s getting to close to white trash in a couple of the characters, which is awesome. One of them is also an alcoholic, and it’s not the movie star alcoholic - this feels like the real deal, and it’s terribly tragic to watch. Even Arnold is pathetic in away, mourning his family who once was killed by the enemy, but trying to hide those feelings.
As stated above, they’ve shortened the movie a lot, but it still feels more like a very violent thriller than an action film - thank you! The mystery is quite good, the kills is incredibly gory and violent, the shoot-outs is packed with squibs...everything shot in a realistic, gritty way without going shaky cam. Yeah, I dig this flick so much! Not sure I will return to Arnold, but if he makes something like this again it might happen. Give it a try, it’s not bad.
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