David Ayer fans are currently looking forward to his Beekeeper reunion with Jason Statham on A Working Man. However, a new audience is currently discovering the director’s panned 2014 action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of his more forgotten movies. Sabotage is at the top of the streaming chart on Starz, the latest in a long line of mostly forgotten action movies that have found new life on streaming.
Ayer made his name with gritty action movies like Training Day, but also dipped his toes in something more fantastical with 2016’s Suicide Squad, and last year found huge success with The Beekeeper, both in cinemas and on Prime Video. Sabotage was not a success by any stretch of the imagination when it was released, landing just a 21% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics and ending its theatrical run on $22 million, which was substantially below its $35 million budget.
In the movie, Schwarzenegger plays John "Breacher" Wharton, the leader of an elite DEA task force specializing in high-stakes raids on dangerous drug cartels. While raiding the safe house of a cartel, the team discover and steal $10 million, with the group planning to spilt the money between them when the heat is off. Things get complicated when the money goes missing and, after being suspended and reinstated through an internal investigation, Breacher’s team begin meeting brutal ends one by one, leaving their leader in a race against time to discover who the killer is.
The film sounds like a standard by-the-book action thriller, and that is pretty much how it played out. The cast of Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington, Olivia Williams, Joe Manganiello, and Josh Holloway are more than capable of holding their own in this kind of movie, but sometimes the material is just not able to be saved.
Being panned by critics and finding little more love from audiences, it is easy to believe that the film was a complete write-off, yet it was seen as one of Schwarzenegger’s better performances following his return to Hollywood after his stint as Governor of California. However, as many pointed out, even if Arnie was pulling his considerable weight, it was hard not get dragged down by the incredible levels of violence for violence’s sake.
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In the midst of the collateral damage, Schwarzenegger’s Breacher was a darker and more complex role for the actor. While it still saw Arnie dishing out his usual revenge and justice, the character’s history with the cartel and personal loss helped at least elevate his role in the movie to something a little more three-dimensional. The role was seen as delivering Ayer’s plan to blur the lines between the good and bad guys, something he has frequently played around with in his sandbox. Also, like many of Ayer’s movies, the original version reportedly contained much more depth of character, and ran for over three hours before being trimmed down to a reasonable 109 minutes by the studio. Listen to the ghostly echoes of “Release the Ayer Cut.”
