Sabotage
(2014)
Is David Ayer an on-again, off-again director or does he
just get lucky despite himself? Sabotage
comes along with such an apparent absence of basic filmmaking wiles, one ends
up veering towards the latter conclusion; the behind the scenes wrangles might
lead one to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this isn’t the first time
he’s laid an egg. And, as the latest in Arnie’s damp squib of a comeback trail,
it’s an ill-fitting suit for his persona yet one that’s so tone deaf as a whole
his presence neither couldn’t be said to mar the surrounding material.
Ayer’s debut Harsh
Times, coming off the back of acclaimed screenplays for Training Day and Dark Blue, had a number of things going for it, not least a strong
performance from Christian Bale at its centre. Likewise, End of Watch worked to Ayer’s lack of strengths as a director (to
the untrained eye he has no clear sense of where to place the camera, how to
edit or pace a scene, or even a grip on rendering basic narrative trajectory)
by adopting first person/found footage gimmickry in one of the few big screen
examples that actually works. I’d presume Ayer, being a veteran and all and a
proper guy (the kind who puts lily-livered actors through boot camps and
getting them all barking appreciation at how he encouraged them to feel like
real men), is aiming for a rawness and immediacy in his approach. The danger
with that is, if you aren’t absolutely clear about what you’re aiming for and
why, the results end up looking clumsy or plain amateurish.
In that sense Sabotage
is a lot like Street Kings, only less
proficient. Street Kings is a mess
that, even though it feels like the natural relative of Sabotage, Ayer didn’t write (he probably did a pass over it,
though). In both movies you have a less-than-esteemed actor (there Keanu, her
Arnie) trading against an ensemble of both great and curiously cast peers in a
cop movie about dirty officers and honour and the gap between. I have a lot of
goodwill towards Keanu, but he doesn’t quite stick in that one. Few do,
however. Chris Evans is great, but he usually is. Hugh Laurie took the
peculiarly cast Brit part, which is here commandeered by Olivia Williams as a
no-nonsense, acerbic homicide cop with a wandering accent who has to deal with
Arnie’s reprobate semi-feral DEA task force. She also has to make out with
Arnie, which will at least sets her up for chat show anecdotes for the
foreseeable future (if not her entire career).
Sabotage announces
itself as gritty and grim-faced but then embarks on an ever more excessive
rampage of eviscerations and excitably explosive exchanges that are anything
but believable. Ayer has shot himself in the foot with his eccentric casting
but the concoction in general smacks of posturing and fakery, from the
trying-too-hard crude talk to the nervy handheld camera and snuff videos. There’s
something distasteful and borderline juvenile about the venture. If I were charitable,
I’d lay the blame for the picture at the door of the producers who cut the
movie against Ayer’s wishes, but there seems to me to be zero chance that this
picture conceals a thee-hour director’s cut of assured tone and carefully arbitrated
performances. The plot scarcely makes sense to begin with, and only becomes
less intelligible as the picture progresses. That the picture is one great botch
up at least means Ayer gets to claim he was stitched up.
The unseemly and incoherent plot, in brief, has Arnie’s John
“Breacher” Wharton and his team under investigation after some loot goes
missing from a drug cartel’s safe house. Who was actually responsible (they took
it alright, but then someone whisked it away from under their noses) is anyone’s guess, but it’s soon looking very much as
if the cartel knows all about what they’ve done as the team steadily loses
members one by one, their entrails unspooled to scenic effect. What is actually
going on is so ridiculous, it’s barely worth your time attempting to figure
out, and Ayer appears to believe several miles of intestines are an appropriate
substitute for a complete absence of suspense.
The divide between the actors who have signed up here
thinking they’re onto something good (a talent like Ayer!) and those who are
desperate is probably 50-50. Arnie, of course, has never been able to do “natural”
and is utterly adrift trying to exchange banter with fellows who can actually blend
in (even if it’s in service of dross). He’s also so old now that his
traditional lumbering gait has been reduced to crashing about with barely any
coordination. His haircut’s very silly too. And he snogs Olivia Williams. Did I
mention that? Poor silly Olivia. Arnie is a man out for revenge, but he’s not
really selling it, and Ayer is banal enough to serve him up a Colonel Kurtz
hand-rinsing scene when we flashback to his earlier bid for justice.
Sam Worthington, who clearly isn’t going to be the next
Aussie big thing any more than Eric Banana was, is filling in as many projects
as he can before James Cameron turns him blue again and saves his career. This
time he grows a big busy chin beard in the hope it will distract from his
inability to bring anything interesting to the table. He’s just too late to
guest on Sons of Anarchy, which is a
shame as he has much big screen presence as Charlie Hunnam.
Big mad wolfman Joe Maganiello looks absolutely enormous even
next to Arnie. He shouts and rages a lot, clearly attempting to imagine himself
up there with the Austrian Oak in Predator
but failing to realise this is several decades in quality apart. I guess
nothing’s been quite the same for Terrence Howard since he lost the Iron Man gig. Josh Holloway is
completely wasted. Which I don’t get, really; the guy has charisma to spare, so
why not cast him in stuff? Then there is Mireille Enos who is utterly
convincing as the utterly batshit crazy girl team member. However, it has to be
said her macho-ing it up with the big boys in a sub-Vasquez Aliens manner gets old very quickly and
finding out she has a drug habit gets even older quicker.
Also on board is Lucas’ fellow Lost-er Harold Perrineau (“Waaaaalllt!”)
who’s good fun as Williams’ partner, certainly much more than he was on that
series, and Martin Donovan, who’s everywhere these days it seems but too rarely
in a role that is actually worthy of him.
Sabotage
is a distasteful, unpleasant mess that reminds one of some of the less salubrious
‘80s action fodder, the Cobras of
this world. It’s quite shocking how inept the debacle is. Ayer doesn’t so much
ramp up action scenes at sets them off shambling and jerking about in a uncoordinated
fit, accompanied by an undercooked score (from David Sardy) that sounds like a
temp track drifting so far under the action you’d be forgiven for expecting a
voice over to pitch in and start describing the scene. Blood seeps and pours
and lacerates across the frame but to absolutely no impact. There’s a scene in
which a cyclist gets bonneted on a car that proceeds to get ripped in half by a
truck; in the hands of another director (Jack Sholder on The Hidden, say) this kind of hideous excess would be
accompanied by a macabre sense of humour. Here it’s just ugly sensory overload
to no end other than in and off itself. There’s a twist on top of the plot twist,
but it leads to a scene so moronic you wonder if the reason this feels like an
incoherent mumble is because Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods were making it all
up as they went along.
