Sabotage (2014)
Directed by David Ayer
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.
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5 films that influenced Sabotage
What critics say influenced Sabotage
Odd as it sounds, Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods were loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s classic mystery “And Then There Were None.”
Patterned after Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None," Sabotage follows an elite DEA special ops team led by Arnold who start getting picked off one by one after their $10 million in stolen drug cartel money goes missing.
Sabotage makes the bold attempt of re-imagining Agatha Christie’s seminal murder mystery novel And Then There Were None as a modern crime-thriller about a DEA special forces team that attempts to rip off a cartel, only to find their stolen loot missing and big target on their backs.
(Or, to be more accurate, it originated as Ten Little Niggers, the 1939 Agatha Christie whodunit whose title was quickly changed to And Then There Were None.)
The plot lifts from Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," but neglects the mystery.
Once it gets into And Then There Were None territory, the movie stalls.
The film’s plot is a variation on Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, set in an elite DEA unit.
Instead, with its tired “Ten Little Indians” ideals, this thriller fails to excite.
Directed by David Ayer, who’s pretty much become Hollywood’s go-to guy for gritty cop films, this modern-day twist on Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” shares the same basic premise used for one of Schwarzenegger’s biggest hits, “Predator.”
It helps that Schwarzenegger has settled nicely into his age: He’s more convincing here as a gruff manager than he is as an action hero, the way that an aging John Wayne functioned in Howard Hawks films like Rio Bravo and Hatari! and El Dorado.
Director David Ayer, who co-scripted with Skip Woods, wrote Denzel Washington to an Oscar in “Training Day” and made a more than credible directorial debut with 2012’s “End of Watch.”
For every “End Of Watch,” a “S.W.A.T.” He’s been reliably unreliable as both a scribe and director, and here he takes on both roles, sharing script duties with Skip Woods, writer of mostly maligned action fare (“A Good Day To Die Hard”).
With 2006's "Harsh Times," 2008's " Street Kings ," 2012's " End of Watch ," and now "Sabotage," writer-director David Ayer has the marketplace cornered for violent, gravelly action-dramas centering around law enforcement and the hazards that come with the profession.
His previous film, 2012’s End Of Watch , was an episodic LAPD two-hander that got by on its weird and occasionally wacky cinematography—the camera was mounted on everything except a tripod—and the rapport of leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña.
But there’s this: Sabotage, the latest testosterone-driven shoot ’em up from David Ayer (screenwriter for Training Day , director of End of Watch ), happily stretches the action genre as far as possible to include a human interest story centering around its lead, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
More confounding than this idiotic plot, that starts out stupid and plunges into the murky depths below, is the fact that the highly talented David Ayer (writer/director of 2012’s End of Watch and writer of 2001’s Training Day) is this movie’s director and co-writer (credit shared with Skip Wood).
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Graphic torture and violence prevail, and as Oliver Stone proved with his drug-running actioner Savages , the bloody terror of the Central and South American drug cartels is so harrowing that no Hollywood movie can portray it without seeming exploitative.