Sabotage

For F*** Magazine

SABOTAGE

Director: David Ayer
Cast:         Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Olivia Williams, Joe Manganiello, Terrence Howard, Josh Holloway, Harold Perrineau, Max Martini, Gary Grubbs
Genre: Action, Thriller
Run Time: 109 mins
Opens: 10 April 2014
Rating: TBA

As per his oft-quoted promise, the Governator is back from politics and on the silver screen, in a film that promises to be tougher and grimier than either The Last Stand or Escape Plan. In this film based very loosely on Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None, Schwarzenegger plays John “Breacher” Wharton, the grizzled leader of an elite DEA squad. The motley crew includes Monster (Worthington), Grinder (Manganiello), Sugar (Howard), Neck (Holloway) and Pyro (Martini) – nobody has an un-silly nickname, except perhaps Lizzy (Enos), who’s also Monster’s wife. After a bust goes awry, the team members are picked off one by one in gruesome fashion. FBI agents Caroline Brentwood (Williams) and Darius Jackson (Perrineau) are sent in to investigate, all signs pointing to the mastermind being someone in Breacher’s circle.

Action movie junkies have bemoaned the lack of truly great American action movies as of late, citing the homogenisation that results from every film having to be rated PG-13 to pull in the crowds, having less bite to them because of it. Sabotage pulls no punches when it comes to the violence – it seems like somebody was having a 2-for-1 sale on blood packs. The action is visceral and bereft of noticeable digital enhancement. But make no mistake: Sabotage is far from a “great American action movie”. Chaotic, mean-spirited, dumb and deafening, it pummels the audience into submission. Director David Ayer, who has carved a niche making gritty cop thrillers, gives Sabotage some of the documentary-like style he’s become known for, but the script that he co-wrote with Skip Woods is heavy on the insipid tough guy dialogue and light on wit and invention. This should be no surprise, seeing as Woods had a hand in penning the likes of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, A Good Day to Die Hard and Swordfish.



Watching the team in this film at work just really made this reviewer miss the guys who followed Dutch into the jungle in Predator. Practically everyone in Breacher’s squad is a jerk, chugging beers, hanging out at strip clubs - they’re just not really interesting, let alone endearing. It’s impossible to buy the group as a well-oiled machine who have been operating as a unit for some time, since they’re always at each other’s throats, and not in an amusingly dysfunctional way either. Now, of course it would be boring if everyone just got along, but if it seems like nobody has anyone else’s back, the audience is hard-pressed to give a damn when each team member starts biting it. As a result, this whodunit soon gets increasingly tiresome, instead of increasingly absorbing.

Schwarzenegger does make for a convincing team leader, worn, grizzled and serious. Thankfully, he doesn’t do a whole lot of referencing his status as a pop culture icon. It seems contemporary moviegoers regard Schwarzenegger as not much more than a punch-line, a fount of cheesy one-liners and a relic of the over-the-top 80s. It’s a bit of pity as his acting is not bad at all here.

The supporting cast isn’t remarkable but for what it’s worth, it’s cool that there are two Terminators on the same team (the other being Sam Worthington). Worthington has a reputation as a wooden, cookie-cutter action hero, but he’s competent as the only guy in the team with his head screwed on right. The distracting “ponytail beard” hanging from his chin does snatch a good deal of the credibility away, though. Mireille Enos spends most of the film being quite annoying, though it’s probably more the script’s fault than it is hers. She’s the lone girl on the crew has to constantly prove she can stand among the boys. How original and empowering. Olivia Williams fares only slightly better, her no-nonsense investigator being a character we’ve also seen a million times.

The film’s attempts at humour are cringe-worthy and oddly scatological. The team squirms as they wade through a sewer, and there are two random agents tasked with monitoring Breacher who have an extended conversation about peeing into a bottle. Yes, of course there are shootouts and car chases, and while the action scenes don’t feel overly staged, they also lack creativity and style, little more than flurries of bullet hits and gratuitous blood spatter (that poor cyclist on the windscreen). Pointlessly cruel instead of shocking or impactful, Sabotage has even less substance than your average spectacle-filled summer blockbuster, Schwarzenegger’s stoic turn its sole saving grace.

SUMMARY: We used to have at least a few brain cells. We watched Sabotage, and then there were none.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

Prisoners

For F*** Magazine

PRISONERS

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Viola Davis, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, Paul Dano
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Run Time: 152 mins
Opens: 19 September 2013
Rating: NC-16 (Coarse Language)

We’ve seen many examples of the “Papa Wolf” archetype in cinema over the years, a character who transforms into an unstoppable force of nature after his child is hurt, kidnapped or otherwise threatened, making the offenders wish they’d never crossed him. In films such as Ransom, John Q, the recent Snitch and of course Taken, fathers have leapt into the fire in the name of ensuring the well-being of their kids. Hugh Jackman now joins the ranks in this mystery thriller.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, a carpenter and repairman in the small town of Conyers, Pennsylvania. On Thanksgiving, Keller, his wife Grace (Bello), son Ralph (Dylan Minnette) and daughter Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) go over the house of Franklin Birch (Howard) and family for dinner. Afterwards, they discover that Anna, along with Franklin’s daughter Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) is missing. Police detective Loki (Gyllenhaal) leads the investigation; a mentally handicapped young man named Alex Jones (Dano), cared for by his aunt Holly (Leo), seemingly involved. Keller is convinced of Alex’s guilt and takes matters into his own hands, repeatedly clashing with Loki as the days tick past with no sign of Anna or Joy in sight.



If the synopsis makes Prisoners sound like Taken but with Hugh Jackman, be informed that it really isn’t. While Taken was a straight-up action flick with Liam Neeson blasting a path of vengeance through Paris as the audience cheers him on, Prisoners is a thriller of the “glued to your seat with shivers down your spine” variety. The film marks the English-language debut of Québécoise director Denis Villeneuve, whose film Incendies was a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar contender. Prisoners is a tightly directed piece, a sense of foreboding established early on.



The film plays out in a realistic small town setting; bleak, dreary and constantly raining. Multiple Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins of The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, True Grit (2010) and Skyfall fame, delivers some nail-biting moments with nothing more than a slow push-in. The eerie, cello-driven score by Jóhann Jóhannsson endeavours to redefine the word “ominous” and is very effective, if heavy-handed and obvious at times.



Hugh Jackman has established himself as one of the best-liked leading men in Hollywood over the past decade, and it’s easy to see why: he can dance, sing, do comedy, do drama, do action and is very personable in interviews. In Prisoners, we truly get a chance to see a side of the actor we haven’t before. As a father driven to the brink, he is remarkably believable. Keller lashes out, gets mad and does some pretty unpleasant things, but Jackman’s conviction ensures the audience is always rooting for him even as he trudges past moral boundaries and we question his methods. He also never flies into histrionics or goes laughably over the top; the flashes of raw fury behind his eyes conveying a primal anger even Wolverine might respect.



He’s backed up by a supporting cast that’s very strong by any standards; for what might be seen as a smaller movie, it sure has roped in some top-drawer talent. Jake Gyllenhaal previously investigated child kidnappings as real-life true crime author Robert Graysmith in Zodiac. His character here is less obsessive and not so much consumed by his job as dutifully going about it. Detective Loki, possibly snicker-inducing name notwithstanding, is a character we want to see succeed as much as we want to see Keller find his daughter.



Paul Dano is very good as Alex and is an actor who deserves to hit the big time very soon. Is he just feigning a disability and is really the devious mastermind, or is he a victim himself? Dano plays it such that we’re not so sure one way or the other. Melissa Leo at her suburban grandmother-iest also ensures we’re never quite certain if Keller should be trusting her. David Dastmalchian is fantastically creepy as the other prime suspect, while Viola Davis and Maria Bello both make for convincingly distraught mothers. If there’s a weak link, it might be Terrence Howard, who struggles to match up to Jackman’s skill level. Dylan Minnette and Zoe Borde as the older kids of the Dover and Birch households also deliver rather stilted performances.



However, this far from cripples this absorbing film that manages to be feverishly suspenseful without being emotionally manipulative. There are several “plants and payoffs” that might be too blatant to some viewers; points of plot which are laid down in full view so they can be picked up on again later. The masterful construction of the piece isn’t undermined and from its haunting atmospherics to its powerhouse lead performances, Prisoners is the kind of film that doesn’t loosen its grip for a second.

SUMMARY: Its premise may sound straight out of any number of police procedural TV shows, but tight direction and a firing-on-all-cylinders turn from Hugh Jackman ensure that this will be lurking around the corners of your mind for a fair bit after leaving the theatre.

RATING: 4 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong