I expected Sabotage to be a fun movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger and a small team of bad-asses who invade Mexico with an absurd amount of weaponry and wipe out all the drug cartels, rescuing Arnold’s family in the process. That’s certainly what the preview made it look like. And really that’s all it could ever want or aspire to be, isn’t it? What’s the point of it being anything else? It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, for Christ’s sake. But the makers of Sabotage had much larger aspirations. They wanted to make a grandiosely bleak statement on the dark side of human nature – greed, jealousy, obsession, revenge, criminality, torture, murder, misogyny, and drug cartel “psychology” – as if these topics are not adequately documented in cinema. I can inform you that they did indeed make such a statement, and they did it really badly. The story is just an endless stream of violence, military jargon and coarse, unfunny humor, the narrative makes little sense, the characters are uniformly foul, uninteresting, and emotionally indistinguishable, the cinematography is lousy, and the dialog is pathetic. My wife and I emerged from the theater in horrible moods that took hours to wear off. Seriously, there is no reason to see this film, even if you really like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is absolutely terrible.

In closing, I would like to pause for a moment and briefly bemoan the sad career of Terence Howard. After his magical performance as D Jay in the modern classic Hustle & Flow, what the hell happened to him? Red Tails? Iron Man? Shit roles in The Company You Keep, Prisoners, and August Rush? And now here he is in Sabatoge, playing a guy named “Sugar”, a role with maybe 20 lines tops, none of them interesting. Can someone please write this amazing actor a decent movie to star in?