sabotage movie review

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Having written and/or directed the likes of " Training Day ," "Harsh Times" and "End of Watch," David Ayer has staked his claim as being one of Hollywood's go-to guys for wildly implausible and inexplicably celebrated sagas involving cops who are on (or at least adjacent to) the edge. With his latest work, "Sabotage," he has divorced himself from the recurring elements of his filmography in two key areas by giving viewers a story that focuses on DEA agents who are on the edge and which is so preposterous that no sane person could possibly celebrate it as anything other than inadvertent comedy. This could well be the single most implausible film playing at your multiplex this weekend and bear in mind, "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" is still in release.

One-time action king Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as John "Breacher" Wharton, a two-fisted, hard-drinking Atlanta-based DEA agent who, as the story opens, leads a ragtag group of colorfully nicknamed agent—including " Monster " ( Sam Worthington )' "Grinder" ( Joe Manganiello ), " Sugar " ( Terrence Howard ), "Neck" ( Josh Holloway ), "Tripod" ( Max Martini ), " Smoke " (Mark Schlegel) and "Lizzy" (Mirelle Enos)—on a raid of a cartel safe house that they are using as a smokescreen for stealing $10 million dollars in drug money for themselves. Alas, when they go to retrieve the money later on, they find that it has disappeared and to make matters worse, their higher-ups somehow know about the missing money and yank them all out of the field while trying to find enough conclusive evidence.

After eight months, the Feds throw in the towel and not only reinstate them all but allow them to reform their group on the basis that no one else will work with them because of the shame they have brought on the department. At this point, someone begins bumping them off one by one in extraordinarily elaborate and gruesome ways. At first, the assumption is that one of the cartels they have tangled with in the past is behind the killings, most likely the one from whom they took the still-missing money. However, as the body count continues to rise, the increasingly paranoid gang begins to suspect that one of their own is responsible. As tensions mount, Breacher, along with a local cop ( Olivia Williams ), tries to get to the bottom of the murders while confronting the dark secrets that led to him trying to steal all the money in the first place.

Essentially a head-on collision between a gritty cop drama and an over-the-top slasher film that leaves no survivors, "Sabotage" is a genuinely weird movie in most respects but unfortunately, it isn't so much interesting-weird as it is "What in God's name were they thinking?"–weird. The storyline is such absolute nonsense from top to bottom that it makes the Beastie Boys music video for their song "Sabotage"—a knowing spoof of Seventies-era TV cop dramas—seem like "Heat" in terms of dramatic believability. To be fair to Ayer, a good portion of this lunacy may be he handiwork of co-writer Skip Woods , who has helped to pen such crimes against the action genre as " Swordfish ," " The A-Team " and "A Good Day to Die Hard." Whoever is ultimately responsible for it, the screenplay is little more than a foul-mouthed stew of ridiculous twists, unpleasant characters and a conclusion that basically abdicates all narrative responsibilities in order to jam in a chase, a violent concluding shootout and an even more violent coda that feels trucked in from another movie.

Although the film does him no favors, I can understand why Schwarzenegger signed on to this project—after the failures of " The Last Stand " and "Escape Plan," he no doubt felt the need to shake things up a bit. Unfortunately, the script does him no favors and most viewers will be thinking that he is just a tad too old to be playing this particular character. However, his always-unique line readings do inspire the closest that the film gets to actual entertainment, which is more than can be said for his co-stars.

Terrence Howard seems to be hoping that Don Cheadle will turn up to relieve him, Josh Holloway plays essentially the same part that he did in the last "Mission: Impossible" film and Mireille Enos , stuck with one of the more embarrassing female roles in recent memory, overacts up a storm. As for Sam Worthington, he is so forgettable that he barely registers even when he is front and center. The closest thing to a good performance comes from Joe Manganiello, who displays enough wit and charisma to sort of make up for his cardboard character.

One last thing about "Sabotage"—it is really, really violent. Yeah, a certain amount of violence is to be expected from a Schwarzenegger action epic but the red and grey stuff flows so freely here that even Dario Argento might have suggested dialing it back a bit. Under most circumstances, I don't have a problem with extreme violence in a film as long as it can be artistically justified but it is laid on too thick this time around and grows very tiresome in no time at all. In other words, "Sabotage" is a film that is a bloody bore in every sense of the word.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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Sabotage (2014)

110 minutes

Arnold Schwarzenegger as John 'Breacher' Wharton

Sam Worthington as Monster

Joe Manganiello as Grinder

Josh Holloway as Neck

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Terrence Howard as Sugar

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Common sense media reviewers.

Extremely violent Schwarzenegger flick with drugs, language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The main thrust of the entire plot is revenge. The

Though technically the good guys, the main charact

This may be the most violent Schwarzenegger movie

Very strong, very frequent sexual innuendo, with s

"F--k" and "s--t" are used quite liberally and fre

A Netflix rental envelope is shown. An Apple compu

The main characters are DEA agents. One of them ap

Parents need to know that action movie Sabotage stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and is arguably the most violent Schwarzenegger movie ever made. It has many shootings, killings, and an enormous amount of blood, gushing, spraying, and pooling, as well as guts and other body parts. It has very strong, constant…

Positive Messages

The main thrust of the entire plot is revenge. The central characters are a group of undercover DEA agents who claim to operate as a "family," but never seem to trust one another. They create an incredible wake of violence, and are prone to stealing, drinking, drugs, and generally poor behavior. However, there are consequences.

Positive Role Models

Though technically the good guys, the main characters of this movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger included, are not heroes to be emulated. They are violent, destructive, reckless, argumentative, and generally behave poorly.

Violence & Scariness

This may be the most violent Schwarzenegger movie ever made, complete with guns and shooting, stabbings, several bloody, gory dead bodies, blood sprays, blood gurgles, and pools of blood. We also see a few minutes of footage wherein a woman is tied up, cut, and tortured while she cries out for help. (We learn through dialogue, that bits of her skin, and her face, were mailed back to her husband.) There are bloody auto crashes, with body parts and organs thrown around the crash scenes. Innocent bystanders are killed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Very strong, very frequent sexual innuendo, with spoken references to people having sex with animals, people having sex with a "tranny," and many other references. A scene takes place in a strip club, with one topless woman shown, as well as several other sexy dancers. At a party, two women kiss on a bed, and a breast is shown. A man prepares to have sex with a woman; she produces a condom and he tosses it away, saying he wants her "raw." One of the major female characters is married and is said to have slept with another man. The main character has a kissing scene, with implied sex. A stripper (clothed) is hired for a party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k" and "s--t" are used quite liberally and frequently throughout. Other words heard include "p---y," "ass," "hell," "bitch," "dick," "piss," and one use of "Jesus Christ."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A Netflix rental envelope is shown. An Apple computer, with logo, is shown. A bottle of Gnarly Head cabernet sauvignon wine is clearly displayed.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The main characters are DEA agents. One of them appears to have a drug problem. She is shown snorting cocaine while undercover, and tasting some liquid meth found in a crime scene. She is also shown swallowing a pill with a gulp of vodka. Otherwise, the rest of the main characters drink a great deal; they are frequently seen with bottles of beer in hand, and drunk more than once. The main character drinks whisky in several scenes, and another cop drinks wine in several scenes. The main character also smokes cigars, and another smokes a cigarette in one scene.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that action movie Sabotage stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and is arguably the most violent Schwarzenegger movie ever made. It has many shootings, killings, and an enormous amount of blood, gushing, spraying, and pooling, as well as guts and other body parts. It has very strong, constant sexual innuendo of all sorts in addition to some female toplessness, implied sex, and sex with more than one partner. Language is also very strong and quite constant with special attention given to the words "f--k," "s--t," and "ass." One of the major supporting characters is shown to have a drug problem, and most of the major characters are shown drinking, and sometimes drunk, throughout the movie. All this aside, it's a fairly intelligent, well-written, realistic movie with a good mystery story, but for adults only. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (6)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Predictable B rated movie feel.

A little interesting movie , what's the story.

DEA agent "Breacher" Wharton ( Arnold Schwarzenegger ) is in charge of a loose-cannon group of undercover agents whose unorthodox methods have been known to bring down powerful drug lords. During one bust, they uncover a huge pile of money and arrange to steal $10 million of it. Unfortunately, when they return to the money's hiding place, it's gone. Some months later, members of the team begin to turn up murdered in gruesome ways, leading the survivors to believe that dangerous cartel members are looking for revenge. But when police investigator Caroline Brentwood ( Olivia Williams ) comes on the scene, and three dead bodies are found in a lake, it casts a new light on who the killer might be, and why.

Is It Any Good?

Sabotage is a combination of harsh realism and old-fashioned cop movie staples, albeit with a bit of a mystery thrown in. Director David Ayer wrote the screenplay for Training Day and directed End of Watch , suggesting that this is a man who knows his way around a story about cops and drug dealers. The movie's sharply, smartly written, and takes place in a world that feels lived-in.

Where the movie potentially steps wrong is in its intense depiction of bloody violence and brutal gore. Seemingly, Ayer is attempting to illustrate just how dangerous this world is, but it comes across as more sensational, like a horror film, and fairly exhausting. It interferes slightly with the rhythms of what might have been a solid mystery story. Yet the cast, setting, and pacing pull it together in the end. Schwarzenegger in particular has really found an interesting character to play.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the movie's extreme violence . Why might the filmmakers have chosen to make it so intense and bloody? How do you think they want the audience to react?

Why do these characters drink so much? What would be the real-life consequences of the drinking and drug use depicted in the movie?

Is Arnold Schwarzenegger a good role model here? Has he been a good role model in his other films or in real life?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 28, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : July 22, 2014
• Cast : Arnold Schwarzenegger , Olivia Williams , Terrence Howard
• Director : David Ayer
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Open Road Films
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Run time : 109 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some sexuality/nudity and drug use
• Last updated : August 23, 2023

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Sabotage (2014)

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Film Review: ‘Sabotage’

Arnold delivers as a possibly dirty DEA team leader, but this over-the-top actioner from "End of Watch" helmer David Ayer sabotages his best efforts.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

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In writer-director David Ayer ’s last law-enforcement drama, the remarkable “End of Watch,” there wasn’t a moment that didn’t feel lived-in and true. The same cannot be said of Ayer’s “Sabotage,” a gruesome and frequently preposterous B-grade actioner about an elite team of DEA agents who run afoul of a ruthless Mexican cartel — and each other. That the team’s battle-scarred leader is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger , in the best and most substantial of his post-Governator comeback roles, gives a mild kick to this otherwise strained attempt at a latter-day “Wild Bunch” or “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” updated to the mean streets of metro Atlanta. Likely to repel even some of the hard-R action crowd with its intentionally scuzzy milieu and lack of a rooting interest, this $35 million Open Road release will be hard-pressed to top sleeper hit “End of Watch’s” $41 million domestic haul.  

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As with a lot of action stars, the repose of late middle age becomes Schwarzenegger, whose face is now as lined as the veins on his still-bulging muscles, and who has the heavy gait of a warrior who no longer quite so easily carries his girth, a Terminator stiffened by age into a Tin Man. He’s well cast here in something of a tailor-made part as John “Breacher” Wharton, a storied veteran of the drug wars whose work has taken its toll on his personal life in particularly brutal fashion. And if Schwarzenegger never had to say very much on screen to impart a sense of wry, steely menace, the years have only sharpened his take-no-prisoners scowl into a kabuki-like mask. It may be stolen drug money that sets the lumbering plot of “Sabotage” in motion, but whenever Ayer holds on Breacher, signature stogie in hand (or mouth), staring off into the void, it’s clear that both the character and the actor playing him are chasing after something no amount of money can buy.

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The rest of “Sabotage” rarely rises to Schwarzenegger’s level, in large measure because the other characters (of which there are far too many) aren’t nearly as sharply drawn by Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods (“Swordfish,” “The A-Team”). Of course, every Hollywood cop movie can be counted on for one or two of those disobedient mavericks who refuse to play by the rules, seed ulcers in the stomachs of their exasperated superiors and by-the-book partners, and who inevitably carry the day with their unorthodox methods. But in “Sabotage,” Breacher’s entire team is comprised of such eccentrics, who are so far out on a limb and so deep undercover that they make “Lethal Weapon’s” Martin Riggs and “True Detective’s” Rust Cohle seem model officers by comparison. (And Ayer, who likes putting his actors through elaborate physical transformations, has had the “Sabotage” cast collectively groomed to look like the first family of Better Homes and Meth Labs magazine.)

We first see Breacher’s team in action during a spectacularly violent raid on a cartel safe house that includes a money room stacked sky high with cold, hard cash. The agents have planned in advance to skim a little off the top — $10 million to be precise — which they ingeniously stash inside a sewer line. But when they return to the scene to collect, the loot has vanished, a single bullet left in its place as an unsubtle warning. Because the FBI happens to know just how much money was supposed to be in the house, Breacher and company are immediately put under suspicion and suspended from the job — a six-month stretch during which, it seems, the agents do nothing but lounge around their special-ops frat house growing ever more gauche and squalid.

Then, overnight, the investigation goes away (“Do you have a photo of a Congressman fucking a goat?” asks one of Breacher’s superiors, only half joking), the agents are reinstated and, one by one, begin dropping like flies in inventively grisly ways. Where last year’s cartel-crossing cautionary tale, “The Counselor,” gave us death by auto-retracting razor wire, “Sabotage” ups the ante with death by being nailed to the ceiling of your kitchen in a crucifixion pose.

Who is killing the great DEA agents of Atlanta? Well, the cartel is at the top of the suspect list, but then, so are the agents themselves — at least the ones who are still breathing. They include the volatile Lizzy ( Mireille Enos ), who’s a little too enthusiastic about her work (and taking it home with her); her husband and fellow agent, James “Monster” Murray (Sam Worthington, sporting a shaved head and braided goatee), though we have reason to suspect he’s neither the first or the last of Lizzy’s internal affairs; brooding bruiser Joe “Grinder” Phillips ( Joe Manganiello , in cornrows); and the relatively soft-spoken Julius “Sugar” Edmonds ( Terrence Howard ), so soft-spoken that it only makes him that much more suspicious. Someone somewhere has that $10 million, and someone wants it back.

Doggedly working the case despite the open hostility of everyone she questions is Atlanta homicide detective Caroline Brentwood ( Olivia Williams ), whose name suggests a Los Angeles real estate agent but whose flinty demeanor is that of a determined career woman in an unwelcoming, male-dominated field. And despite her stop-and-go Southern accent and the ease with which the script betrays her character’s intelligence, Williams is the other real bright spot of “Sabotage,” bringing a gravitas to her role and affecting a nice, fractious chemistry with Schwarzenegger in their scenes together — a reminder that Arnold has always been well served by tough, Hawksian women (Linda Hamilton, Jamie Lee Curtis, et al.)

Like Michael Mann, whose fascination with the world of criminals and law enforcement he shares, Ayer (who also wrote “Training Day”) is a detail fetishist who brings a lot of firsthand knowledge to his cinematic depictions of police work. But “Sabotage” jumps the shark early and often with its ever-thickening web of deceit, elaborately fabricated cover-ups and crucial evidence that, at one point, just happens to turn up on a flash drive left by some anonymous Good Samaritan on the seat of Williams’ car. By the time Atlanta devolves into a latter-day Dodge City for the movie’s bloody climax, it has become as outlandish as if aliens from the planet Asgard were tumbling down from the skies. (Which is to say nothing of the still-to-come Mexican coda.)

Even without first-person video-diary conceit of “End of Watch,” Ayer still shows a fascination here with the visual possibilities of lightweight video camera, as well as the contrasting textures of mixed-and-matched video stocks (with scenes that incorporate purported surveillance footage, police interrogation video, etc.). Technically, the pic is deceptively polished in its rough-and-ready pro-sumer way, especially the nimble handheld shooting of d.p. Bruce McCleery and the crisp, kinetic editing of Ridley Scott/Christopher Nolan veteran Dody Dorn.

Reviewed at AMC 34h Street, New York, March 26, 2013. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 109 MIN.

• Production: An Open Road release and presentation of a QED Intl. production in association with Crave Films. Produced by Bill Block, David Ayer, Ethan Smith, Paul Hanson, Palak Patel. Executive producers, Joe Roth, Anton Lessine, Sasha Shapiro, Albert S. Ruddy, Skip Woods, Geoffrey Yim. Co-producers, Alex Ott, Jason Blumenfeld, Gernot Friedhuber.
• Crew: Directed by David Ayer. Screenplay, Skip Woods, Ayer. Camera (color), Bruce McCleery; editor, Dody Dorn; music, David Sardy; music supervisors, Season Kent, Gabe Hilfer; production designer, Devorah Herbert; art directors, Kevin Constant, Richard Johnson; set decorator, Jennifer Gentile; set designer, Thomas Minton; costume designer, Mary Claire Hannan; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS), Lisa Pinero; sound designer/supervising sound editor, Piero Mura; re-recording mixers, Marc Fishman, Christian P. Minkler; visual effects supervisor, Derek Bird; visual effects producer, Andy Simonson; visual effects, Look Effects; special effects supervisor, David Fletcher; supervising stunt coordinator, Mike Gunther; stunt coordinator, Billy Lucas; associate producers, Paul “Sparky” Barreras, Mike Gunther; assistant director, Jason Blumenfeld; second unit director, Mike Gunther; casting, Mary Vernieu, Lindsay Graham.
• With: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington, Olivia Williams, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello, Harold Perrineau, Martin Donovan, Max Martini, Josh Holloway, Mireille Enos.

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Sabotage Review

And then there were none..

Sabotage is far more effective than its action-centric trailers have suggested, with the film more a mystery-thriller that actually offers Arnold Schwarzenegger and the cool ensemble a chance to act and not just shoot guns.

In This Article

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Sabotage Review

28 Mar 2014

Having just rendered W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden as Secret Agent , Alfred Hitchcock adapted Joseph Conrad's dense 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, as Sabotage. He never cared for the film, which was the last he produced for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British, telling François Truffaut that he made too many mistakes in its execution. Yet, it remains an atmospheric London thriller, whose over-arching sense of pessimism reflected a world that had inched closer to crisis by the Nazi remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

    Hitch's greatest regret seems to have been his inability to persuade Alexander Korda to loan him Robert Donat to play Ted Spencer. He clearly had little faith in John Loder and rewrote scenes in a bid to disguise his shortcomings. However, many contemporary critics commended Loder's performance, along with Hitchcock's assured escalation of suspense through the aggregation of telling details. But others felt that he had laid on the psychology with a trowel at the expense of exciting action.

    Hitchcock himself felt that he had wrongly encouraged the audience to side with Verloc by allowing Oscar Homolka (who was as capable of rotund geniality as Mitteleuropean menace) to appear the injured party, as Loder made his less than subtle play for Sylvia Sidney. Moreover, by having him plead with his bomb-making handler, the Professor (William Dewhurst), to avoid a loss of life, Verloc seemed to be even less directly culpable for Steve's death (especially as the boy dawdled on his errand to Piccadilly Station).

     However, Hitchcock considered killing a kid to be an unforgivable error of judgement, which he compounded by having Sidney murder Homolka, in a dinner table sequence that never quite conveyed its accidental design. Yet it was superbly staged, as was the devastating preceding scene in which Winnie watched the Disney cartoon Who Killed Cock Robin? having just learned of Steve's demise. Less subtle, however, was the inclusion of the poster for Graham Cutts's farce, Aren't Men Beasts?, in the background, as Ted tried to persuade her to run away with him.

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Movie Review

Carnage and Chaos, Heavy on the Gore

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By Manohla Dargis

• March 27, 2014

Lovers of camp and cannabis are the most plausible audience for “Sabotage,” given the giggle-to-bullet ratio in this extravagantly silly movie about a gang of marauding Drug Enforcement Administration undercover thugs. Scholars of Arnold Schwarzenegger, its big-ticket attraction, may also want to check in, just to see what the governator has been up to in his postpolitical golden years. Let me spare you the change and the suspense: He can still bench-press serious weight, as a narratively superfluous visit to a gym makes clear, and he’s still not an actor, as is evident by the confusingly indistinguishable grimaces, smiles and vacant looks that he’s put into rotation here.

He enters looking down, heavy head bowed, which proves a foreshadowing of the bummer times to come. Shrouded in muddy darkness, his character, John Wharton, known as Breacher (the name evokes Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s best-selling macho man), is watching a snuff video in which a woman is being tortured to death; this feels like some kind of warning to the audience. Breacher is big and he’s bad, although he may be good. It hardly matters, and neither does the story, which turns on the slam-bam exploits of Breacher’s crew, which calls itself a family (so did Charles Manson’s brood) and is being picked off, one by one, with flamboyant goriness for a kind of Agatha Christie meets Eli Roth mash-up.

The story gets going with noses nestled deep in bosoms and drifts of cocaine and quickly morphs into a visual free-for-all with bodies and bullets flying amid so much yowling that it’s a surprise that Joe Manganiello, who plays an upstanding wolf-dude on the HBO show “True Blood,” doesn’t sprout fur and fangs here. He plays one of Breacher’s minions, alongside some other fine B-listers — Mireille Enos, Sam Worthington, Josh Holloway and Terrence Howard — who all should have a heart-to-heart with their representation. The paychecks might have been nice, and Ms. Enos, for one, might have dug playing a crazy mama with a machine gun. These are amusingly hyperbolic performances until, like the rest of this movie, they grow tedious and dispiriting. Slumming is a risky career move.

It’s doubtful that the director, David Ayer ( “End of Watch” ), who shares script credit with Skip Woods, intentionally embraced self-parody, but it certainly sneaked up on him. The narrative pieces he and Mr. Woods toss out — a dead wife, stolen loot, a D.E.A. investigation, a drug cartel — are hackneyed in the extreme. More memorable and strange is how Mr. Ayer lingers over the movie’s near-vivisectionist moments. In one nocturnal sequence after a train wreck (he likes shooting in the murk), Breacher wanders about, looking at a body that’s been reduced to bloody chunks. Later, he finds an eviscerated corpse pinned to a ceiling, its guts dangling like sausages in a butcher shop window. These images have an undeniable bluntness, but then so does a poke in the eye.

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'Sabotage' undermines itself with too much gore

Arnold Schwarzenegger's tenure as California governor from 2003 to 2011 was pretty even-keeled, neither underscored by accomplishment nor pockmarked by failure. But compared with the second half of his acting career, his politicking days seem Lincolnesque.

Someone needs to get impeached for his star vehicle Sabotage (* out of four; rated R; opens Friday nationwide), indisputably the most violent film of the year and disputably the worst.

Bloody, banal and boasting a surprisingly able clutch of stars who will soon be deleting this from their résumés, Sabotage is a 109-minute cadaver count. It's torture porn for the action set with no discernible message other than, perhaps, that friends who want to hack you and stuff your corpse in a fridge really aren't your friends.

Schwarzenegger is John "Breacher" Wharton, the head of an elite DEA task force that specializes in kicking butt and not taking names.

We're introduced to a raft of swarthy characters with nicknames such as "Monster," "Pyro" and "Tripod." There's no keeping track of all the actors, who include Terrence Howard, Sam Worthington and Mireille Enos. But not to worry: Characters die off like logic in Sabotage.

During a raid on a drug cartel safe house, our rogue band decides to skim $10 million in cash seizures. The opening scene is unsettling as federal agents nonchalantly blast suspects — and the money goes missing. Soon, Breacher's soldiers systematically get their brains splattered.

But it's impossible to build tension when you don't care a lick about the characters. It's been years since a movie collected such an unlikable group of "heroes," who kill bystanders, disregard civilians and treat other cops as grocery clerks on cleanup duty. A half-hour into Sabotage , the mystery of whether the group was set up becomes moot: They all deserve their grisly fates.

What makes Sabotage particularly puzzling is that director and co-writer David Ayer did End of Watch , a terrific look at the brutal daily grind of L.A. police work. Those cops, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, were fleshed out and painfully human.

But Sabotage seems intrigued only by gore. Breacher spends nights watching footage of his wife and son being tortured and snuffed by the cartel (his motivation for bending the rules). Maybe his cable is out. We get loads of open wounds and autopsy shots. Heads pop like overripe watermelons.

To its credit, Sabotage 's action is non-stop. The chase scenes are spectacular. Folks die in creative ways: They bleed out, get crushed by trains and are sheared in traffic.

But if a body count is not your measure of a movie's quality, Sabotage is, from beginning to end, unpleasant.

Which makes Schwarzenegger's post-gubernatorial track so odd. Since returning to the screen, he's anchored the questionable The Last Stand and Escape Plan, and now this. If this is executive decision-making at work, he may want to consider his old day job.

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Directed by David Ayer

Leave no loose ends

John "Breacher" Wharton leads an elite DEA task force that takes on the world's deadliest drug cartels. When the team successfully executes a high-stakes raid on a cartel safe house, they think their work is done – until, one-by-one, the team members mysteriously start to be eliminated. As the body count rises, everyone is a suspect.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Sam Worthington Olivia Williams Mireille Enos Joe Manganiello Harold Perrineau Josh Holloway Terrence Howard Max Martini Kevin Vance Mark Schlegel Maurice Compte Ned Yousef Martin Donovan Michael Monks Nick Chacon Tim Ware Gary Grubbs B.J. Winfrey Kendrick Cross Hakim Callender Troy Garity Morgan Alexandria Jermaine Holt Jaime FitzSimons Everton Lawrence Neko Parham DeWayne Calhoun Maia Moss-Fife Show All… Parisa Johnston Alan Gilmer Emily B. Torres Catherine Dyer Patrick Johnson Jose L. Vasquez Eddie J. Fernandez Adrian F. Gonzalez Jared Woods Antony Matos Laurence Chavez Maya Santandrea Travis Lee Young Terry Gragg Paul Anthony Barreras Amy Parrish Elizabeth Davidovich Andrew Comrie-Picard Andrew Fincher Mario Ramirez Reyes Michelle Alvarado Martins Melissa Martínez Jimmy Ortega Sabrina LeBrun Luis Moncada Chris Trouble Delfosse Carlos Ayala Daniel Moncada Ralf Moeller

Director Director

Producers producers.

Bill Block Palak Patel Paul Hanson David Ayer Ethan Smith Gernot Friedhuber Mike Gunther Alex Ott Paul Anthony Barreras

Writers Writers

David Ayer Skip Woods

Casting Casting

Lindsay Graham Ahanonu Mary Vernieu

Editor Editor

Cinematography cinematography.

Bruce McCleery

Additional Directing Add. Directing

Mike Gunther

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Skip Woods Joe Roth Sasha Shapiro Albert S. Ruddy Geoff Yim Jason Blumenfeld Anton Lessine

Lighting Lighting

Dan Cornwall David McLean

Camera Operators Camera Operators

Ramon Engle Paolo Cascio Micky Froehlich

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Gabriel Beristain Marc Dobiecki

Production Design Production Design

Devorah Herbert

Art Direction Art Direction

Kevin Constant

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Thomas Minton Jennifer M. Gentile

Special Effects Special Effects

James L. Roberts

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Derek Bird Andy Simonson

Stunts Stunts

Kyle Woods Mike Gunther Billy D. Lucas Michelle Alvarado Martins Denise Gallo Elizabeth Davidovich Martin De Boer Jennifer Badger Chad Guerrero Luci Romberg Jasi Cotton Lanier Rosie Bernhard

Composer Composer

David Sardy

Sound Sound

John Sievert Marc Fishman Christian P. Minkler Albert Gasser Piero Mura Daniel S. Irwin

Costume Design Costume Design

Mary Claire Hannan

Makeup Makeup

Tina Roesler Kerwin Matthew W. Mungle Carla Brenholtz Quintessence Patterson Tracey L. Miller-Smith Toby Sells

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Lance Aldredge Kelvin R. Trahan

Open Road Films QED International Albert S. Ruddy Productions Crave Films Roth Films Universal Pictures

Releases by Date

24 apr 2014, 28 mar 2014, 09 apr 2014, 10 apr 2014, 17 apr 2014, 01 may 2014, 07 may 2014, 19 jun 2014, 11 jul 2014, 23 jul 2014, 06 aug 2014, 07 nov 2014, 17 sep 2014, 15 jun 2021, 08 sep 2014, 25 sep 2014, 20 aug 2018, releases by country.

• Theatrical MA15+
• Premiere 14
• Theatrical 15
• Theatrical 12
• Digital Prime Video
• Theatrical 18
• Theatrical Κ-15
• Physical DVD, Blu-ray
• Theatrical 16

Netherlands

• Physical 16 DVD, Blu ray
• TV 16 RTL 7

New Zealand

Russian federation.

• Theatrical 18+

South Korea

Switzerland.

• Theatrical R

110 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Sofa Sinema ★★★★½ 15

Blissfully gritty and violent combination of pulp action and neo noir. It's the strongest in a string of distinguished work since Schwarzenegger has returned to movies. This is David Ayer's uncompromising reaction to The Expendables and it's not for wimps. Olivia Williams and Mireille Enos turn in exciting gender-defying performances as the hard-boiled women trapped in this nightmare of throbbing, reckless machismo.

Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 14

David Ayer's playground. A shit-storm of cocaine highs and piercing lows, a cry against endless, carefree violence and lighthearted heroics. This is how Ayer sees law-enforcement; various teams of flawed soldiers rampaging through apartment block mazes and facing a decision at every corner. It's this delusionally serious brand of neo-noir in which Sabotage bathes in, using blood and guts as the shampoo/conditioner combo. Truly sickening, but formally intense and vivid in a way that most American actioners don't even attempt. Arnie is all in on the trauma, oozing gravitas in a film that already is drowning in its own filth. Such a splattery Georgia nightmare that it deserves its own admirable "and fuck you too." nod of recognition.

Still cackling about the fact that this guy is doing a superhero movie.

Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 11

Not just narratively nonsensical and graphically violent but with an extra layer of "Look how edgy I am" bullshit posturing for cake-icing that makes it all the more disreputable. Frankly I never thought I'd see an American action film this gleefully depraved, downright sadistic, and pretentiously pleased with itself ever again. Indefensibly vile and so of course I went crazy for it. They should have sent a poet.

Ayer's fetish for rock-n-roll tactical antics and his clear affinity (and studied ear) for macho cop camaraderie finally pays off here, too, with the added bonus of making the characters all the more nightmarishly reprehensible.

Features some fascinating parallels to Arnold's real life, as per Matt Singer 's Unified Schwarzenegger Theory (tm). Past…

Review by Todd Gaines ★★½ 35

The Terminator is the leader of a squad of cowboy DEA agents. When 10 million dollars goes missing his team starts to be picked off one by one in this hard R action flick. Home movies. Shit stained pants. Cocaine. Tit grab. Lizzy the Slut. Nut kick. Automatic weapons. DYNO-mite! Meat shower? When these fuckers get killed you actually see blood. Take that PG-13 Expendables 3. It's hard out here for Terrence Howard since he was replaced in the Iron Man series. The loot is on fire. Tunnel rats. Sawyer got off the island? For some reason I'm really diggin' Sam Worthington's goatee. What if you had a mullet and a long ass goatee? Dick stick. Pumping Iron. Have you…

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 1

this is what i imagine ayer thinks a coen bros movie is—an absolutely reprehensible farce of vile individuals doing/saying horrendous things to others & each other, pushing back against the system that made them (or, in this case, just let them loose)... then, at the end of the day, sitting back with some scotch & a cigar and grinning about it. i laughed so hard at the biker that gets crushed, not once, but twice, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. probably the most unpleasant movie made in the 2000s. kinda great.

The greed and mistrust of a bunch of psycho dirtbag killers comes head-to-head with a giant of action cinema (with a body count higher than any of them) determined to impose his history of loss onto them in excruciatingly gruesome detail. One of the most blatantly sadistic and repulsively textured movies released by a major studio this decade.

Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

Schwarzenegger’s character is named John “Breacher” Wharton. The nickname refers to his work as an elite federal officer who leads drug raids. Sometimes, people call him just “Breach,” a word that has a ton of meaning for both Schwarzenegger’s character (who has a secret in the film) and the real-life Schwarzenegger (who breached his family’s trust and had plenty of his own secrets that were revealed a few years before this movie came out). And of course, the seemingly generic title, Sabotage , can refer to all sorts of things, both within and without the events onscreen.

Breacher has a bunch of pictures on the wall of his house; Breacher with Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. It’s supposed to be Breacher…

Review by comrade_yui ★★★★

a beer-battered blood-soaked bombardment of betrayal and idiocy. david ayer's fetish with the aesthetics of urban and moral decay is frequently stomach-churning, but when applied to characters this disgusting and a story this vile, i can't help but admire the trashy harmony that sabotage strikes between tactical door breaches and slasher violence. easily the most effective use of schwarzenegger since 1994, his iconography giving real weight to the psychopathy unveiled.

Review by matt lynch ★★★★

Just vile. I may never stop grinning.

Review by ScreeningNotes ★

"Who the fuck dropped ass?"

Expectations are a tricky thing. I went into David Ayer's Sabotage expecting—hoping for—a mindless action movie. It didn't have to be The Raid , I merely wanted something better than other disappointing entries we've seen this year, from 3 Days to Kill to Brick Mansions . Unfortunately, while Ayer handles his action scenes well, no amount of cinematic bloodshed would be enough to make me want to spend another second with these annoying, immature idiots. After almost two hours of objectifying women and reinforcing negative gender stereotypes, these characters all deserved much worse than what was coming to them.

Maybe it's on purpose. Maybe it's an attempt to portray the reality of undercover police work. Maybe it's…

Review by nathaxnne [hiatus <3] ★★★★½ 10

Sabotage definitely has something to say about the fissures erupted between fully militarized policing and the more traditionally practiced variety as being something like FOX ANIMAL ATTACK TV depictions of difference between killer bees and not-quite-as-killer bees and how one might become the other, but it is most effective when operating as a DEA Slasher Throwdown, blood-choked and delirious, whose greatest trick is assuming audience familiarity with the David Ayers Corrupt Law Enforcement Film Algorithm and shaking it to near-death in its jaws like a hapless chew toy rendered unrecognizable from store-bought initial conditions. As a late-Arnold vehicle, Sabotage might be seen as exceeding expectation, except for the fact that this Post-Gubernatorial Slight Return might be rapidly becoming the very…

Review by Obistrike ★ 16

Let me be 'clear', this movie is a huge pile of stinky garbage. The direction, score, grunt talk, acting and story are beyond hideous and the violence is needlessly excessive. Sabotage also looks cheap, the action is ludicrously staged and that ending is the worst. Woeful.

I just can't for the life of me fathom why Arnie of all people would agree to such a charmless and unimaginative screenplay.

Shamefaced David Ayer gets a pointy hat and sits in the dunce corner. A monumental failure.

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Sabotage Reviews

• 85   Metascore
• 1 hr 16 mins
• Watchlist Where to Watch

Hitchcock's interesting study of a coward involved with secret agents in London. Sylvia Sidney, Oscar Homolka, John Loder. Brother: Desmond Tester. Renee: Joyce Barbour. Superintendent: Matthew Boulton. Vladimir: Austin Trevor. Chapman: William Dewhurst. His Daughter: Martita Hunt. Also called "The Woman Alone" and "A Woman Alone."

Terrorist Karl Verloc (Homolka) is engaged in a bombing spree in London using a trusting young boy Stevie (Tester), the little brother of his wife Sylvia (Sidney), to deliver the packages of destruction without knowing their contents. Meanwhile, neighborhood grocer Ted Spencer (Loder), actually an undercover Scotland Yard detective, is investigating Verloc's activities. A tense and chilling espionage picture, SABOTAGE contains one sequence that many consider among the director's most excruciatingly suspenseful; Hitchcock, however, later called it a mistake. While delivering a package containing a time bomb, the unknowing Stevie is delayed several times along the way, and ends up on a public bus which stops and starts in traffic as the bomb ticks away. In an interview with Truffaut years later, Hitchcock observed that "the boy was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful." Truffaut called the sequence a near abuse of cinematic power, and Hitchcock agreed, although his posture of repentance is difficult to reconcile with comparable cruelties in, for instance, PSYCHO and FRENZY. SABOTAGE was banned in several countries where censors viewed it as a handbook for terrorism. Based on a Joseph Conrad novel entitled The Secret Agent, the film's title was changed to SABOTAGE to avoid confusion with Hitchcock's previous picture SECRET AGENT. The confusion came later, however, in 1942, when Hitchcock directed SABOTEUR. If you're not confused yet, SABOTAGE was originally released in the US as A WOMAN ALONE.

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Thursday, March 27, 2014

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Sabotage [Movie Review]

Sabotage [Movie Review] | I came across Sabotage by chance. I watched it to fill the  time - just because and no special reason. 

Sabotage (2014) Trivia

• Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington, Olivia Williams, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello, Harold Perrineau, Martin Donovan, Max Martini, Josh Holloway, Mireille Enos
• Directed by: David Ayer
• Produced by: Bill Block, David Ayer, Ethan Smith, Paul Hanson, Palek Patel
• Production companies: Albert S Ruddy Productions, Crave Films, QED International, Roth Films
• Distributed by: Open Road Films, Universal Pictures
• Release date: March 28, 2014
• Running time: 109 minutes
• Rating: R (for some strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some sexuality/ nudity and drug use)
• Country: United States
• Language: English
• Tomatometer: 22%
• Metascore: 41%
• IMDb: 5.7/ 10
• The movie was heavily cut. The original was rumored to be close to 3 hours.
• Arnold greatly disliked his haircut in the film.
• Sam and Arnold have both had roles in Terminator movies as terminators.

John, the leader of the DEA's Special Operations Team, leads his team on a raid on a cartel warehouse. One the members was killed. The team steals USD10 million and hides it in the sewer before blowing up the rest to cover their tracks. When they return later to retrieve the money, it was gone - apparently was taken by someone. 

Somehow the agency gets the wind of the theft and the whole team was suspended while it was being investigated. After months of investigation with no confession from any of the member, the team is reinstated. But the members have changed over time, each is suspicious of another and constantly on the verge of a fight among them. 

When one by one of the members were being killed in a cartel revenge style, the remaining members become very conscious and starts to suspect that they are being targeted for the cartel raid. 

Caroline Brentwood and her partner Darius Jackson of the Homicide Department are assigned to the cases. When they found the cartel member bodies inside a lake and the bodies were dated before the first killing, they realised that the killings might have been carried out by someone else and framing the cartel for it.

Who takes the money and who kills the members? Was it for revenge or for the money? 

Plot: 4.2/ 5.0 The movie is at least quite entertaining to me. The story-telling keeps me guessing who did what to whom. 

The answers came a bit too early to my liking - it would have been a better plot if the answers were revealed at the end of the movie. 

Cast: 4.6/ 5.0 Everyone delivered a fairly good performance. But I agree that this one is quite gruesome.

Will I Watch It Again: Not in a very near future but I don't mind watching it again. 

The pictures are taken from multiple s ources on the Internet. Thank you .

#Sabotage #Action #Drama #Crime #Thriller #Netflix #MovieReviewbyRawlins #RawlinsGLAM #RawlinsLifestyle

Posted by Rawlins GLAM

You may like these posts, post a comment, 12 comments.

Nampaknya filem ni macam leh masuk genre yang hubby sis suka ni. Nampak Arnold S dah tua sangat ye?. Hampir tak kenal muka dia. Wahhhh ada bintang 'Avatar' juga....

Okay jap lagi nak tengok la. Suka betul cite genre camni dengan arnold tu lagi..haaa

The big draw here is definitely arnold. So it is a bloody and gory movie? Hmm...would like to watch it.

Filem ni pun Sis ko tengok separuh, sebab anak suka tengok time nak tengah malam, so Emaknya tv tengok dia, tau-tau kejut dah habis.. takpe nanti boleh sambung, nak tau gak kesudahan dia..

yes arnold is back hahahhahahaha... wehh rindu dgn lakonan dia.. nanti nak tgkla movie ni

Walaupun filem lama tahun 2014, ruby tengok juga hari tu juga. Arnold Schwarzenegger tu uols. Mesti best lakonan dia. Tapi kesian lah team dah macam keluarga kena sabotage kan Rawlins. Arnold buat sebab berharap family dia masih hidup di Mexico. Tiber sedih plak. Hahaha

tua dah arnold ni hahaha tapi stunt dia macam orang muda! hero kegemaran ramai ayah kite pun suka tengok dia berlakon. pendek kata kalau ada dia mesti akan layan cite tu sebb tau filem tu mesti filem aksi

Belum layan lagi cerita ni. Suka tengok arnold berlakon. Nanti nak layan

menarik gak storyline movie ni. pernah ternampak poster movie ni tapi tak sempat nak tengok lagi. Boleh la tengok malam ni sambil kunyah popcorn..

Uishh, big names in this movie ya.. nampak macam gempak jer.. ada guessing game and plot twist la macam ni since one by one got killed.. aduii.. tertanya2 pulak the ending of it..

Thanks for sharing this here, I actually enjoyed the male actor who also acted in terminator series movies, so definitely will watch this. Cheers, siennylovesdrawing

Dah lama tak layan cite2 mcm ni next time bolehlah tengpk sbb mcm menarik

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Movie Review: 'Sabotage'

March 27, 2014 / 5:02 PM EDT / CBS Philadelphia

By Bill Wine KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's not an act of sabotage, but it is an act of extravagant and aggressive borrowing -- to no avail.

The new action crime thriller Sabotage borrows the title of the 1936 Alfred Hitchcock thriller (that was borrowed once before for a martial arts thriller in 1996), the plot of the 1939 Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None, and the structure of a previous Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Predator .

But the film is neither Hitchcockian in its suspense or sophistication, nor Christie-like in its cleverness or intricacy.  (At least it's predatory.)

Instead, it is a macho, violent shoot-em-up that doesn't do much more than squeeze triggers and slobber over carnage.

In the gritty Sabotage, Schwarzenegger plays John "Breacher" Wharton, the renegade commander of an elite Drug Enforcement Agency task force that finds itself being hunted down and picked off one by one after they bust into a Mexican drug cartel safe house and remove $10 million.

Or, at least, try to remove the money because it's no longer there.  Who took it?

Breacher's crew includes Terrence Howard, Sam Worthington, Joe Manganiello, Josh Holloway, Max Martini, Kevin Vance, and Mireille Enos –- each nicknamed male a cardboard cutout virtually indistinguishable from the others.

Meanwhile, Olivia Williams and Harold Perrineau play the Atlanta homicide investigators who are looking over Breacher's shoulder, and Martin Donovan is the superior who lets Breacher go on working with his crew even though he's a suspect under investigation.

In true Agatha Christie fashion, the body count rises and everyone's a suspect.

But in false Agatha Christie fashion, the whodunit element is trotted out and then ignored:  all that really seems to matter here are the scenes of violence and mayhem.

Director David Ayer ( End of Watch, Street Kings, Harsh Times ), who wrote the screenplay for Training Day and co-wrote the Sabotage script (previously titled Ten and Breacher ) with Skip Woods, looks at first as if he cares about the plot enough to make it worth sitting through all the ho-hum gunfights and shaky-cam confrontations, which glorify the use of automatic weaponry to a ridiculous degree.

Post-politico Schwarzenegger has governed his second-chance movie career rather well to this point, having turned in solid, respectable work as the star of The Last Stand and the co-star of Escape Plan .  Here he commands the screen and the focal role in decent fashion, but the narrative goes so far off the rails in the film's conclusion that it feels as if the screenwriters are satirizing their own product in a morally objectionable way.

The rest of the cast merely poses and glowers, with the exception of Williams, who is interesting to watch as the cop sparring with Schwarzenegger, mostly because we're not used to seeing her in such a hard-edged role.

But that's just the slimmest of silver linings in this gory, tiresome cloud.

And then there were just 1½ stars out of 4 for this muscular and brutal, bullet-riddled and futile mystery thriller that offers action instead of drama.

Sabotage sabotages itself.

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Kinds of Kindness Review: All Star Cast Delivers a Film That is Equally Absurd and Disturbing

Trigger warning review: jessica alba takes names in a by-the-numbers conspiracy thriller, gina carano's case against disney could be damaging even if it never goes to court.

Arnie's post-political, action film comeback is taken to new bloody heights in David Ayer's Sabotage . Ayer is the king of gritty cop dramas having scripted Training Day and End of Watch. Those films are vastly superior to Sabotage , but his trademark style of shock and extreme violence are in full effect here. The script is rife with f-bombs, gratuitous nudity, torture, and heads exploding like watermelons. Action junkies like me are sure to get a kick out of the carnage, but it's highly doubtful other audiences will find anything worthwhile in Sabotage .

Schwarzenegger stars as John 'Breacher' Wharton, the leader of an elite DEA special operations squad. The film opens with Breacher and his team of ruffians taking down a cartel leader's mansion. They kill all the baddies, but before destroying a room filled with drug money, they steal $10 million dollars by hiding it in the plumbing. The team gets a nasty surprise when they head into the sewers to recover their loot and find it has been stolen. Six months later, the team has been thoroughly scrutinized for their actions and allowed to return to duty. The team's members begin to die horrifically as they are systematically wiped out. A local homicide cop (Olivia Williams) is tasked with getting to the bottom of these killings. Is the cartel exacting their revenge over the stolen money, or is there another motive behind the murders?

The level of violence in this film reaches a new high for David Ayer. Sabotage shows the methods of the cartel and Breacher's team with unabashed fervor. Even I, the most jaded action critic in the land, was surprised by how extreme the violence is in Sabotage . Ayer wants to portray the total ruthlessness of the drug trade and the blood money that fuels it. Couple in the raw language and nudity, Sabotage is the definition of the hard R film.

The plot is a mystery with a few big reveals along the way. It's entirely nonsensical with plot holes galore, but is anyone really that concerned about the plot when guys are having their heads blown off by high-powered rifles? To it's credit, Sabotage isn't stupid or cheesy. The film is a dark story loaded with casualties. It is definitely not a feel good film or light action like The Expendables.

The best parts of Sabotage are the female leads. First, you have Mireille Enos (World War Z, The Killing) as Lizzy. She's the sole female on Breacher's team and an absolute firecracker; drug-addicted, trigger-happy, and hornier than every guy in the film combined. British actress Olivia Williams is almost unrecognizable as a southern cop that seems to get covered in blood and guts in every fight scene. Sabotage wouldn't be nearly as entertaining without the performances from these actresses. I'm sure they enjoyed playing against type and having more balls than the macho men.

Sabotage is worth seeing for action and Arnie fans. I think it's his most entertaining film since he stopped being The Governator. Definitely not recommended for anyone else. I remember the absolute disgust on this woman's face as she walked out of the screening. Sabotage is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but thoroughly enjoyable if you need an action fix.

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Movie review: Vijay Sethupathi's whodunit thriller 'Maharaja' packs a punch

Entertainment south indian.

This dark thriller has enough meat and macabre to keep us hooked till the end

Also in this package

• Watch: How Vijay Sethupathi went from Dh1,300 Dubai job to Tamil superstar

No spoilers ahead:

Would you go to the police to file a missing object report if your old trash can was stolen? Probably not. But the seemingly powerless barber, Maharaja (Sethupathi), is unwilling to let this small thing slide. He sets out to hunt down his old, dented metallic dustbin before his teenage daughter, Jyothi, returns from her sports camp. The doting single father even agrees to reward the police officer with a handsome sum of money if his bin is retrieved. As far as premises go, it’s one of the most novel ones since Mohanlal’s nail-biting thriller "Drishyam," and Sethupathi flies with it.

Director Nithilan Swaminathan does a neat job of crafting a slow-burn whodunit thriller with a hero who isn’t indefatigable at its core. He’s vulnerable, wounded, and enraged in equal measure.

The first half of the film shows Maharaja being ridiculed and roughed up in equal measure by the law enforcement authorities. While I am not a fan of glorifying police brutality and passing it off for cheap, comic thrills, the movie improves vastly in the second half, shedding its flippant tone.

It picks up pace and ends up being one of the most disturbing, enigmatic, and visceral watches of 2024. The labyrinth route that director Swaminathan opts for might feel tiresome, but stay with this film until the very end and you may feel gratified.

Sethupathi is in blistering form as the hapless dad Maharaja.

With great economy in expressions, he plays the emotional and violent scenes with such aplomb. In the hands of a less gifted actor, it would have become over-dramatic. But with Sethupathi, you see an accomplished actor who isn’t keen to impress but wants his viewers to feel his pain, pathos, and punitive rage.

The same can't be said about Bollywood director and producer Anurag Kashyap who has been handed a complex and morally reprehensible role of a thief. He falters in the dialogue-heavy scenes. Perhaps Tamil not being his native language could have played spoilsport. But in a few sinister scenes, he manages to hold steady. For instance, the dark sequence in which he ravenously eats rice and chicken curry at homes that he targets is chilling, while his mates go about brutalizing the occupants of the home. Kashyap is more more worried about getting all the meat of the bone, than his bestial buddies going on a rampage.

While the film may come across as a hero-led thriller, Sachana Namidass as Maharaja’s spirited daughter Jyothi, Abhirami as Kashyap’s wife, and Mamta Mohandas as Jyothi’s teacher leave a strong impression.

Without giving the plot away, there’s enough meat to keep this whodunit going. Be warned, the violence is hardly gratuitous. Was it absolutely necessary to show body parts being chopped or hands being sawed? Maybe not. But the grotesque twists in the plot might make the viewing more palatable. Many scene in the beginning might leave you confused, but it all ties well towards the end. Think of it like a puzzle that takes time to come together. At no point does the director or the writers take the audience for granted and they refrain from spoon-feeding their viewers. Even the police force, initially shown as a bunch of buffoons, throw a few surprises.

This is Sethupathi’s 50th film in his career, and he makes sure that it’s a memorable one. While a dustbin, a utilitarian contraption to hold waste, isn’t given much respect in society, you may reconsider its place in our life after this film. The dustbin doesn’t feel as trivial or absurd, just like how this film grew on us – bit by bit.

This is one film that should never be binned, by anyone. 

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