Sabotage (2014)

Sabotage (2014).

Sabotage (2014)

It can’t be said SABOTAGE is a good movie, exactly, but one wonders if it strives to be one. Made up of healthy doses of profanity, booze, blood, macho posturing and violent nihilism, the David Ayer film positions itself as a modern day Sam Peckinpah tale, where vulgar men with guns live and die by them and there is no such thing as true camaraderie. SABOTAGE exists fully in this world and has no remorse for its brutality or misanthropy, which is why at the end of it – after about 100 people have been messily murdered and nary a shred of goodwill exists – I couldn’t help but grudgingly admire that the film lives and dies by its own nasty code.

It’s still an ungainly thing, totally pumped up on angry adrenaline; it’s like the movie version of the loudest roided-up jerk lifting weights at the gym. The narrative doesn’t make much sense and the roster of characters is stunningly unsympathetic, a group of people no one on Earth would want to spend a lick of time with.

It is, of course, another vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger 2.0 (or has he reached 3.0 at this stage?), and Arnie is Arnie, as ever. Here he plays Breacher, the leader of a rough DEA task force. During one mission within the walls of a cartel hideout, Breacher’s crew decides to steal about $10 million worth of drug money. After they’ve blown away about two dozen men, they cleverly stash it in the sewer system so they can reclaim it later, after the bodies have been cleaned up – but when they go back for the loot, it’s gone. The thieves have been stolen from.

Several months later, Breacher is wasting away at a desk job because no one trusts him in the field (his superiors still think he’s stolen the money) while the rest of his team idly waits for something to happen. (“Idly” isn’t necessarily the right word; they drink and verbally abuse each other. A lot.) Breacher gets the good news that his team is being reinstated, and then the group is once again kicking in doors and mowing down bad guys. But the good times stop rolling once a couple of the members are gruesomely killed, indicating someone is out to get them and picking them off one by one. Is it the cartel they stole from, or is it someone within their own group?

Ayer comes from the world of hardboiled men; formerly of the Navy, he’s best known for penning gritty police procedurals like TRAINING DAY and END OF WATCH. Here he’s put together his most testosterone-infused creation yet, as a large portion of screen time is devoted to either obnoxious male bonding, or people being riddled with bullets. Any person not fond of high body counts and obscene language should be prepared to suffer through immense amounts of both in SABOTAGE. Ayer is a capable director and he stages carnage and bloodshed with evident vigor, and he apparently relishes scenes of men behaving badly just as much. If I were handed a buck for every variation of the line “f*ck you dude!” I’d be a millionaire by the time the credits rolled.

Also present in much of Ayer’s work is a pessimistic worldview, and SABOTAGE, though it’s predominantly a blustery action movie, has a moroseness about it that edges it slightly away from the typical Schwarzenegger fare. For his part, Arnie handles himself well enough during his character’s more quiet scenes; Breacher is a tortured man, haunted by the murder of his wife, so he does a lot of sitting around, drinking and contemplating. However, when he’s asked to engage in some of the more colorful wordplay, he sounds like… Arnold struggling through colorful wordplay. But you know what you’re going to get with the big guy, and a devoted Arnold fan won’t have much to complain about here

The supporting cast is an odd thing, because there are interesting actors here but their characters are all but interchangeable. Sam Worthington, Josh Holloway, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello and Max Martini are the bros in Arnie’s squad, and every single one of them has the exact same personality; they’re eager to curse, drink, ogle a stripper, shoot something, and that’s about it. Sometimes it’s even easy to forget one or the other is in the movie.

But special note should be made about the women in this picture. (Actually there are only two lead females, the rest of the ladies are strippers.) It can not be said that Ayer doesn’t play fair when it comes to gender politics, because both Olivia Williams and Mireille Enos have even nastier dispositions than their male counterparts. Williams is a detective on the case who develops an uneasy alliance with Schwarzenegger (and kudos to you if you pick up even the smallest hint of chemistry between these two), while Enos is the most damaged and antagonistic of the DEA task force. These women are profane, intense and, well, completely unladylike, with Enos in particular gnashing into her role as fervently as a rabid dog. Ayer deserves credit for ensuring his women are active participants in the mayhem and not just sideline characters.

The way it handles its women is indicative of SABOTAGE as a whole; it’s unapologetic and offers no comfort. It ends on a down note and once the smoke has cleared one is not sure whether or not it was even “fun.” It’s not boring, but you can still walk away from it thinking there’s something commendable in its coarseness.

Synopsis

Months after an elite team of DEA agents executes a successful raid on a drug cartel, they find their number dwindling under gruesome circumstances.

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Need for Speed (2014)

Need for Speed (2014).

Need for Speed (2014)

Car fetishists and appreciators of extremely loud noises will surely get their rocks off during NEED FOR SPEED, the film adaptation of the EA video from the director of ACT OF VALOR. Overflowing with brooding machismo and shiny automobiles, the movie strives to be no more than an acceptable FAST AND FURIOUS substitute, though perhaps the hope of kickstarting a franchise is in the back of its dopey head somewhere, but there is a chance it spawns another entry in the popular NEED FOR SPEED video game series, one that will be undoubtedly better constructed than this.

The movie’s lone attribute is the fact it has Aaron Paul in the lead, presumably the launching pad for his career as a movie star. (He’s been in films before, of course, but this is the first major post-Breaking Bad role.) Paul, with his husky voice and easy charisma, is a perfect bad boy hero for this kind of movie; just as likely to reveal his heart of gold as he is to seethe and glower. But there’s no question he’s better than the material, and though he must have seen this as a project capable of exposing him to a wider audience, it most definitely feels like he’s slumming it.

The film’s plot, such as it is, involves the rivalry between working class mechanic Tobey (Paul) and professional racer Dino (Dominic Cooper). Dino is like a villain in a 1980s high school movie: smug, entitled, has the pretty girl and the fast cars. Tobey’s a good kid, living in the shadow of his father, struggling to pay his bills and keep open the shop he and his friends have opened. But of course he’s the best driver around (perhaps in the entire world?), which gets under the skin of Dino, what with his massive inferiority complex. In between bouts of staring menacingly at one another, Dino accidentally kills a friend of Tobey’s in a race, then flees the scene of the crime, leaving Tobey to take the blame and the jail time.

Two years later (might as well be about two hours), Tobey is out of the clink and looking for some playback. He gets the gang back together and conspires to clear his name, while also beating Dino in a super secret race held by a hyperactive racing enthusiast known as Monarch (Michael Keaton in a way over-the-top performance). Needing a car, he reaches out to pretty Julia (Imogen Poots), who he met and charmed years earlier and who has access to a souped up Ford Mustang. She’s plucky and game for anything (plus, shocker, she’s a girl and knows about cars!) and ends up accompanying him on a cross-country pursuit to enter the race and have a fateful showdown with Dino.

The weird thing about NEED FOR SPEED’s storyline is that most of the movie is simply getting to the race. Tobey and Julia, joined by Tobey’s gang of colorful co-workers, have to make it from New York to California in about two days, just in order to qualify for the “big” race. The actual race itself is only in the last 20 minutes or so, which is completely anti-climactic. Hence, much of what we see is filler, as the group avoids cops and one close call with some bad dudes looking to drive them off the road at the behest of an anxious Dino; this little subplot is absolutely hilarious and ludicrous in equal measure.

Our heroes drive, it should be said, like maniacs; in crowded streets, on highways, on roads – anywhere they go, they create carnage; but their sheer disregard for anyone other than themselves makes them kind of hard to root for. When civilian cars are being smashed and crunched, you start thinking perhaps it would be a very, very good thing if these people were stopped and arrested. Hilariously, the studio has put a “don’t try these stunts” disclaimer towards the end of the final credits, as if the movie’s target audience will still be in the theater at that point. Perhaps if the goal seemed more noble, you could forgive all the pile-ups, as this is obviously just fantasy, but the movie’s intent on making these guys appear cool and remorseless in their wanton destruction is kind of creepy.

No one expected director Scott Waugh to be capable of Oscar clip material (heavy-handed or corny are the movie’s two primary modes), but his choreography of the action is shaky as well. He relies on odd angles of the races to give them some distinct flavor, but often the racing is disorienting, and his confounding depictions of the car crashes (of which there are many) are jumbled wrecks, not unlike the cars themselves after they’ve flipped over a few hundred times. NEED FOR SPEED has the emotional range of a pre-teen, and while I know it’s too much to expect serious intrigue or depth in a living, breathing video game, there’s an amazing lack of effort put into this script. Chris Morgan’s FAST AND FURIOUS screenplays might as well have been penned by David Mamet when compared to what writers George and John Gatins have created here. (John Gatins was nominated for an Oscar only a few years ago for his FLIGHT script. What happened?) The film’s (unintentionally?) best line comes from Keaton: “My inbox is white hot!” Make of that what you will.

Obviously NEED FOR SPEED was not for me, and I really don’t believe it will be for most. It’s brash, irritating and tiresome – and 130 minutes long, an inexcusable length for a movie of such meager ambition. At around the 90 minute mark you realize the film’s third act hadn’t even started yet, which was very troubling indeed. For a movie that supposedly thrives on adrenaline, NEED FOR SPEED is maddeningly plodding, taking forever to get where it wants to go.

PLOT: A mechanic, framed for a crime he didn’t commit by his rival, vows to avenge a friend’s death and defeat his enemy at a secret multi-million dollar car race.

Have fun 😉

 

 

 

 

 

22 Jump Street (2014)

22 Jump Street (2014).