“In writer-director David Ayer’s 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 End of Watch‘s $41 million domestic haul.” — from Scott Foundas‘s 3.27 Variety review.

I like this passage: “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, 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.”