Sabotage

Arnie's comeback to the big screen hasn't exactly been going well, with The Last Stand and Escape Plan both flopping hard enough for him to go running back to the Terminator franchise next year for a guaranteed hit. In the meantime, his latest attempt to remain relevant has opened to the lowest opening weekend at the U.S. box office in his ENTIRE career, and was torn apart by critics on that side of the Atlantic. Coming from the director of End Of Watch and the writer of Training Day, can it really be THAT bad?

Arnie plays Breacher, the head of a rag-tag bunch of DEA agents who might not follow the rules but certainly get the job done, one way or another. During one particular mission, Arnie and his crew siphon off $10 million for themselves, which promptly goes missing. Then, one by one, his crew begins to get killed off rather violently, but is it the gang they stole the money from getting revenge, or is it someone within Arnie's crew looking to keep all the money for themselves?

It's great to see Arnie finally in a role that is far from the invincible superhero we're used to, and while some of his supporting cast are solid, they're all fighting for scraps of screen time, as when the film isn't focusing on Arnie, it’s centred of Olivia William’s officer who’s investigating Breacher's team. Truth be told, her story is far more interesting and her character for more likable, to the point that any time the movie switches back to annoyingly hyper-masculine likes Sam Worthington or Joe Manganiello or Terrence Howard, the movie suffers substantially.

The problem here is that Sabotage has absolutely no idea what genre it's supposed to be in, and ends up being a complete and total mess. There's the obvious police procedural going on, then there's the horror movie elements of Breacher’s crew being picked off with enough blood and gore being splattered to put a Saw movie to shame, and then in the last act it tries to pack in an action-movie car chase AND a Clint Eastwood-esque shoot-out.

By trying to be all of these things, Sabotage ends up being none of them. How they managed to make a super-violent, murder-mystery, action-thriller starring Arnie this boring is beyond our understanding.