new to DVD: Sabotage

I was excited to see Sabotage, and for two good reasons. Screenwriter David Ayer wrote the highly intelligent urban thriller Training Day. And the star is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Look, if you don't like action movies, you don't like Schwarzenegger movies, and if you do, you do. It really is that simple. During his prime, Schwarzengger made some of the best -- and if that's too subjective, let's agree on the words "iconic" and "influential" -- action movies ever made. Even if he had done nothing else, his collaborations with James Cameron are genre-defining moments in the history of cinema. And since coming out of acting retirement, Schwarzenegger has continued to make good choices. I've already noted my appreciation for the Expendables series, but I also found The Last Stand and Escape Plan to be highly entertaining and under-rated. Put simply, Schwarzenegger usually knows how to pick his projects. So yeah, I was excited about Sabotage.

What a disappointment.

Sabotage, starring Schwarzenegger as John "Breacher" Wharton, the leader of an elite DEA tactical team, is an incoherent, thoroughly disgusting mess. Yes, "disgusting" is the best word to describe this movie, because it disgusts on several levels at once. Here are just a few of those levels:

1. The humor. Let me explain to you the running gag. It is repeated again and again throughout the film. Someone on Breacher's team passes gas. Someone else shouts, "who dropped ass?" Part of the "humor" is that even while this question is asked, everyone on the team already knows it's always the same guy. Then comes the punchline of the joke, as someone takes an intentional whiff and tries to guess what the guy had eaten recently. Oh, god, I'm grossed out just describing this joke, and Ayer is so enamored with this joke that he actually repeats it twice within the first ten minutes alone.

2. The language. Here is a typical line from the movie: "oh shit, fuck this fucking goddamn shit!" That's an actual example, and minor variations of this line make up the vast, vast majority of the dialogue. Look, I have nothing against swearing in movies, but dialogue is, above all, supposed to communicate ideas to the audience. Yet nearly every line in Sabotage is so riddled with curse words that I, despite being a reasonably intelligent human being, had real difficulty figuring out what the characters were actually trying to say to each other.

3. The misogyny. There is a woman on Breacher's tactical team. As depicted by Mireille Enos, Lizzy Murray is depicted as foul-mouthed and tough as the rest of the team, ostensibly to prove that she's just one of the boys, but the character seems to have no purpose other than to engage in dirty "just kidding, sort of" sex talk with the guys on the team. To compare this with Schwarzenegger's other most recent film, The Expendables 3 was able to introduce a woman into the boy's club and manage to acknowledge her sexuality without making it her only defining characteristic; she was as respected by the filmmakers as any of the other characters were.

By contrast, the opening scene of Sabotage establishes that Lizzy -- presumably representing the movie's general attitude toward women, I'm guessing based on the evidence -- is willing to have unprotected sex with a criminal in the course of an undercover investigation. Uh, yeah, right, I'm sure that's standard protocol for undercover agents, right?  Give me a break.

4. The set design. The opening scene includes a toilet overflowing with fecal matter, and also a scene in the sewers. It goes downhill from there.

Now, in case you haven't been keeping track, let me re-cap the first ten minutes: two iterations of an unnecessarily elaborate fart joke, several variations of "fuck this fucking goddamn shit," an undercover DEA agent having unprotected sex with a bad guy allegedly in the line of duty, and an overflowing toilet. In the first ten minutes. Or, as one of these guys would say, "shit, and that's just in the first ten fucking minutes, goddammit!!"

5. The so-called "characters" and "plot." The plot is, to use a word that you might be getting tired of by now, incoherent. Basically, Breacher's team is supposed to recover drug-and-gun money, but they instead decide to steal it for themselves, and declare the money "missing," the twist being that the money really is missing, and they only intended to steal it, but they honestly don't know where it is. But here's the thing: Even after watching the movie, I didn't understand any of this (possibly because of all the dialogue being too punctuated with "F this" and "shit that" for me to follow what was being said.) The only reason I understand what was going on is because I read the Wikipedia page on the storyline. I must emphasize that this is unusual for me. I'm usually the guy who gets thoroughly annoyed when people watch a movie and say "I didn't understand" this or that part. For me to be this thoroughly confused says something about the movie, not about me.

As for the characters, with the minor exceptions that Schwarzenegger is the leader and Lizzy is the over-sexualized woman of the group, every single member of Breacher's team is completely interchangable. Yes, we get it, they're foul-mouthed tough guys who are happy to live in a gritty world by making it even grittier. Once again, a comparison with The Expendables shows, as in that film, all of this can be communicated with some degree of class, and still allow for individual personalities. Not so here. If I don't bother to mention the other characters by name, this is why; differentiating between the characters simply doesn't matter, not to the storyline, not to the writers, and so certainly not to us. So why, in God's name should we even care when things start going wrong for Breacher's men? When the DEA's Internal Affairs starts breathing down their necks, even when they start dying one buy one, who the heck cares? If the writers aren't going to bother investing some individuality into these characters, how do they expect the audience to invest any emotion into their fates?

Oh yeah, the guy named Pyro does have some individuality, I suppose, as he's the guy who farts all the time.

Hey, if after reading all of this, you still want to watch this movie, go to. But this movie single-handedly changed my mind about admiring David Ayer as a filmmaker, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a man who knows how to pick a good project. That should tell you something.