RoboRabbit89
Arnold is really cool in this film even though it's not his best work.Arnold plays John Wharton aka "Breacher" leader on the DEA
swat team. On their latest bust his team find a large crate size
of money and they agree to steal it ( at least a small amount).In this film Arnold doesn't play a good cop or at least not
a squeaky clean one. It's been awhile since I've seen this,
I can only remember seeing this at least maybe four times
and that I think was three years ago so I'm a little fuzzy on
details. The movie is basically a whodunit because himself
and his team are targeted and being killed one by one by an
anonymous killer and their stolen drug money is missing.Director David Ayer is the co-writer with Skip Woods they both
made I feel an alright little action-mystery thriller here, but having
said that this movie does have is flaws which I'll get into some here.The dialog is not really good, or at least in parts, but on the whole it's
OK. The characters could have been written a little better as in the
team mates, I don't know, I felt something was missing because you
don't feel really close to them. As for the Arnold's character, at least
you cared for the most, his dialog wasn't great either but OK in parts.
On to the murders, the after views of team mates killed are fairly horrific
and quite gory too so if your squeamish you have been warned, but it's
really not that bad because those scenes are briefly shown and their aren't
that many.On to the good stuff, the action scenes are awesome and very exciting,
there is a car chase scene where Arnold is in the back of a truck firing at
a car with the shooter in the open trunk firing back that scene was awesome.
And they're cool shoot outs plus an awesome kick ass ending that is very
satisfying which I love.Overall not a great movie but I think it's one of those sort of fun tough guy
action movies that is in my opinion a bare bones no BS type that can be
enjoyed once and awhile.I give this a 4/10. If your an Arnold fan or even an action fan I think
you can enjoy this, give it a look.
Cathex
Yes, it is a very political movie. It presents the point of view that the militarisation of the US Police force is not something to be questioned, but to be celebrated and sensationalised. After all, in this film the cops need the light armoured personnel carriers, the assault rifles, the full camouflage ballistic body armour and of course the tactics of urban warfare because they are fighting foreign drug cartels armed with 50 calibre machine guns for goodness sake! Not US citizens.The fact of the matter is that giving this kind of impression to the public trivialises and undermines a very serious current debate about what kind of role are we asking our Police to perform? I.e. should they think of themselves as soldiers fighting an actual war on crime in the heart of America, or should they think of themselves as peace keepers who serve the public interest and keep people safe? It wouldn't take a huge leap of the imagination to guess that Arnold is totally behind the idea of Police as warriors. And I'm sure he is as eager as the rest of us to see the cops use all their cool battlefield gear. The trouble is that it may just encourage that military hardware to be more frequently deployed against normal citizens in the US as the public become desensitised to it and certainly goes a long way to making it appear not only normal, but cool.The worst kind of mindless and irresponsible crap to come out of Hollywood in recent years. Only watch if you want an example of the way in which the media is used as a propaganda tool to push the political opinions of lobby groups and right wing financiers.
Bryan Kluger
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on quite a role since his political career in California. He has come back in full force to the movie world and has given us three films, including this one, with five more projects on the way. Needless to say, he has been busy. The first two films, since his time in the Governor's chair in California were 'The Last Stand' and 'Escape Plan', both of which were PG-13 action vehicles for Schwarzenegger that had a silly and highly entertaining premise, even though the plots of both films were ridiculous. But in both of those movies, we received Arnold's famous one-liners and his angry glare as he looks down upon his enemies with a giant machine gun in his hand, ever so ready to add to his impressive body count.Writer/director David Ayer, who is known for directing the recent 'End of Watch' and writing 'U-571' and 'Training Day' amongst others is here to tell us that he has gloriously brought back Schwarzenegger to true form in 'Sabotage'. If you've been waiting to see Arnold back in an ultra violent movie with enough blood and gore to compete with an 'Evil Dead' film, then you are in luck. But be cautioned, for as the credits roll, your brain will try to make sense of what you just saw on screen and how it all tied in. If you try to do this for more than 30 seconds, you might have a breakdown, as you'll realize the plot is such a failure and the screenplay is completely laughable, that nothing seems to make sense on screen. At least Schwarzenegger got to smoke a cigar the size of a cucumber through the whole movie, so there's that.The film opens up with Schwarzenegger watching a video of a woman being sadistically tortured as he seems to be related to the woman on screen (it's his wife). We cut to an undetermined time later where John 'Breacher' Wharton (Schwarzenegger) leads an elite undercover DEA team to take out the most dangerous drug cartels. The team consists idiotic nicknames of 'Grinder' (Joe Manganiello), 'Monster' (Sam Worthington), 'Sugar' (Terrence Howard), 'Neck' (Josh Holloway), 'Pyro' (Max Martini), Tripod (Kevin Vance), and Lizzy (Mireille Enos) , who for some reason doesn't get a nickname, but is one hell of a drug addict.This team takes down a drug cartel and comes across a bunch of money in their basement. The team take ten million off the top of the stash to keep for themselves, which is a recurring theme in 'Training Day'. But when the day is over, the ten million dollars goes missing, leading Internal Affairs to grill each member of this undercover squad for several months. Once things settle down, Breacher tracks down his team again who seem to have be cracking dick and fart jokes and playing video games for the last six months, rather than training to take on another cartel.However, each one of the team members are killed off in very gruesome ways, which has the remaining team members along with police detective Caroline Brentwood (Olivia Williams, whose character goes nowhere) looking for a certain cartel that might be responsible for this. But through this lazy and clunky screenplay and story telling, we can tell that one of the team members might be committing these horrendous murders against their own as they start to turn on each other.With cheesy lines of dialogue throughout, gratuitous nudity, and a confusing and horrible story structure, this bloodbath of a film might leave you unsatisfied, despite the above mentioned traits. Schwarzenegger seems to be at home here as a leader of a group of macho people, but it never goes from that one note trait. The rest could be played by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and are mostly indistinguishable characters. Are these guys heroes or villains? Well maybe that's for you to decide, but whatever you come up with, we can all agree that 'Sabotage' is still a killer Beastie Boy song and not a great movie. And no, they did not play the song in the film, which feels like a missed opportunity, like the entire movie was.
