Sabotage (2014)

David Ayer's Sabotage arrives as a slab of grim procedural brutality, all flop sweat and severed limbs, and it would like us to know that the DEA is a rough neighborhood. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Breacher, the leader of a Special Operations team that lifts ten million dollars from a cartel safe house and then watches its members get picked off one by one. The film is not interested in why. It is interested in how the bodies are arranged.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is largely inert. The ensemble includes Terrence Howard and Harold Perrineau, and Olivia Williams and Mireille Enos occupy roles of genuine consequence, but the screenplay never pauses to make an argument about any of it. Williams's detective is competent and Enos's killer is lethal, and the film treats both facts as simple casting rather than thesis. There is no racial reckoning, no gender critique, no environmental sermon, no economic indictment of the wealthy. The villains are cartel enforcers and, eventually, a colleague with a sniper rifle. The corruption is personal, not systemic in the way that word now travels.

Networks of DEA corruption should not be confused with a critique of late capitalism, and a woman who kills her teammates is not automatically a feminist statement. The film has no interest in instructing us. It wants to show us a man who lost his family, took the money, and flew to Mexico to settle the account. The final image, a wounded Breacher with whiskey and a cigar, awaiting whatever comes, is the closest the picture gets to a moral position: none. It is a nasty, efficient machine, and it never once tells us how to feel.