When Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Terminator 2”) left his stable career of headlining action films and headed into politics, much of the void that his kind of celebrity once held had been filled with larger than life spectacles. No longer would it seem that an action star could be a better draw for audiences than giant mile high robots tearing apart yet another city.
Based on a mystery that seems rather aloof, “Sabotage” often doesn’t seem too concerned with solving it. The $10 million in stolen money is once again robbed from under John’s nose, and one of Wharton’s team members supposedly has it. But the answers to clues, often involving the mystery, are presented as incoherent or just scattershot. Ayer’s interest primarily lies with the focus on establishing a thematic string of brotherhood and machismo instead of the leg work involved with solving the mystery. These duties are simply handed off to another actor.
After Wharton’s team becomes the focus of a series of murders, Olivia Williams (“Hyde Park on the Hudson”) is brought in as a no-nonsense detective chosen to solve the case. It’s Ayer’s chosen method of finding someone to pin the detective work on, though as much as Williams attempts, the film doesn’t seem to support her investigations. “Sabotage” favors brawn over brains.
“Sabotage” is often very graphic. While impressively detailed make-up effects are shot with cinematography rendered in dark greens and blood curdling reds, there’s nothing to support the technical display on hand when much of “Sabotage” is at best mediocre. Chase sequences often involve ridiculously conceived set-ups. However, Ayer’s shootouts fair much better, and though recurrent, they never offer a satisfactory resolution besides piling on more body mutilation.
Williams thanklessly happens to keep much of the central premise for “Sabotage” together, even as everyone else has moved on to more salty moralizing. While “Sabotage” does stand to be Schwarzenegger’s darkest character yet, surpassing such films as “Collateral Damage” and “End of Days” in thematically dark tones, he still has to maintain his well curated image.
Schwarzenegger enjoys eliciting nostalgic memories from an audience, feeding them frequently throughout “Sabotage” with a regular diet of over exerted male backslapping comradery and repeat exclamations of “get down.” Ayer presents him in a far more opaque light than any other film he’s been in, but Schwarzenegger doesn’t seem eager to let go of his action hero iconography.
If the ending of “Sabotage” is any indication, Schwarzenegger won’t be any time soon, and he’ll keep on exploiting all that nostalgia guns blazing with a massive cigar hanging from his mouth.
