Sabotage

Year 18, Day 250 - 9/7/26 - Movie #5,424

BEFORE: I hope you had a peaceful Labor Day, but if you had to work I hope you made a lot of tips. We went and had our late lunch (or maybe early dinner) over at the Factory that makes Cheesecakes, I prefer to think of it as the factory outlet. If you go at the right time you might see a shift change, a lot of people wearing hard hats and protective gloves, those are the factory workers that make the cheesecakes, or so I've been led to believe. If those workers ever unionize, if there's ever a "Norma Rae" over at that factory, I think the company will be in a spot of trouble, they may retaliate by shutting down the factory and re-opening it overseas, and that will cause a lot of blue-collar factory workers to lose their jobs. Anyway, it was an appropriate thing to do on Labor Day because the stadium got me the gift card for working for them for a whole year, which is nearly two basketball seasons, one with the Nets and one with the Liberty. The WNBA season isn't over yet, it's just on break for some weird kind of mid-year tournament. I don't think I go back for another two weeks, maybe - but I'll be back at the theater on Wednesday. 

Terrence Howard carries over from "Hart's War" and tonight he plays one of these hard-working (umm, I think) DEA agents on a special task force. Sure, that's relevant for Labor Day, why not? 

THE PLOT: Members of an elite DEA task force find themselves being taken down one by one after they rob a drug cartel safe house. 

AFTER: Well, we just finished three films with Bruce Willis, and one of them, "Gasoline Alley" was part of that wave of films that was made as he was getting ready to retire from acting. This film is kind of the reverse of that, because Schwarzenegger DID retire from acting for a few years, while he was the "Governator" of California. He left office in 2011 and the plan was to jump right back into making movies, however he suddenly got busy with "personal issues" that were related to getting a divorce and I think revealing a secret family he had on the side. Say it with me now, "Artist Brain" happens when an actor or filmmaker thinks that the rules don't apply to them, and marriage is obviously an agreed-upon set of rules. So there was a bit of a delay in getting back into movies, starting with "The Expendables 2" in 2012 and "The Last Stand" in 2013. "Sabotage" was released in 2014, so it was still part of his first wave back, somewhere between "Expendables" episodes 2 and 3. 

But this film was a box-office bomb, partially I think because it wasn't part of a larger franchise like a "Terminator" or "Expendables" movie, it was a one-off, even his own fans might have preferred that he make another "Conan" movie rather than this, whatever this is. This film is also a tougher sell because it's extremely confusing and well, let's just say it doesn't have a happy ending. People want to be thrilled with the action but they want the good guys to come out on top and they want the bad guys to die, I'll be damned if I can tell exactly who the good guys are here. The elite DEA task force is filled with anti-heroes and rude, unsavory people, and that's a bit hard to root for. I'm not saying they have to all be clean-shaven vegetarians who all abstain from alcohol and drugs, but if we're coming to the cinema looking for role models, it helps. We want our heroes like Jason Statham, like all tough and gritty but they need to have a strong moral center, they need to know what's right and what's wrong. 

There's a really fine line here between the DEA agents who are constantly drinking, swearing, doing drugs and breaking the rules and the lawless drug dealers that they're supposed to be taking down. When we first see the team, they're breaking into a drug dealer's mansion, with the intent of stealing millions for themselves, and well, you know, that's not really a good look. When their stolen money gets stolen by someone else, that could have been a teachable moment, and then when the team members start getting hunted down and killed off, one by one, that's an even clearer signal that maybe they messed up big time. You don't take $10 million away from a drug heist and NOT have consequences from that. Meanwhile it sounds like the team got investigated by Internal Affairs for months afterwards, and then they all got reinstated, so I guess you could say they were lucky that somebody stole their stolen money?  

Except that's not the case at all - first "Smoke" died during the raid, and then somebody dragged "Pyro's" motor home on to the railroad tracks while he was sleeping, and hid the keys so he couldn't drive off.  Look, I don't even want to tell you what the cartel assassins did to "Neck", but it's pretty disturbing. They should have been motivated at this point to give the money back, but the only problem is that they don't have it. OK, maybe it's time to separate and take some time off, everyone just go on vacation for a few months and don't tell anybody where you're going...

Meanwhile, an Atlanta police detective is put in charge of investigating the motor home murder, and this puts her in contact with the rest of the team, who won't give her much help, don't want to answer her questions, even though someone keeps succeeding at taking them out. Dude, take the help if the police offer it!  The detective learns that John "Breacher" Wharton, the leader of the team, had dealings with the cartel years ago, and his wife and teenage son were taken by the Mexican drug lords and horribly tortured before they were killed. Ah, so he's got a very personal beef and he's motivated to take down all drug lords everywhere - his heart might be in the right place but maybe his methods still need a little work because stealing money from the cartel was still a really bad idea. 

There's a twist about halfway through, I don't want to give it away here because it's so darn confusing that it's barely believable. However, the title of the film kind of gives a little something away, and I'll say no more beyond that. Suffice it to say that they try to put the team back together in the second half of the film, but everyone is so uptight and paranoid at this point that even though the team members have worked together for years, nobody trusts each other, and everyone believes that somebody on the team either stole the money, or is working with the cartel to take the rest of the team down. It's a bit like "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in that sense, people working together to steal such large sums of money eventually all find ways to not trust each other. But perhaps they're right to not trust each other if that's all it takes for them to fight and fall apart. Film critics at the time also noted the similarities here to a modern-day version of a spaghetti western (with a bit of Agatha Christie mixed in). 

But again, audiences tend to want it all - they want to have an action film with lots of violence and people being shot, but they also want a feel-good film, and you get that when the bad people die and the good people (mostly) don't, and, well, that's just not what we have here. Now the director designed this to be something of a mystery thriller, and then he claimed that the studio re-cut it to be more of a traditional action film. Well if you try to change it all around late in the game, I suppose you're bound to have some problems somewhere. 

Directed by David Ayer (director of "A Working Man" and "The Beekeeper")

Also starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story"), Sam Worthington (also carrying over from "Hart's War"), Joe Manganiello (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Josh Holloway (last seen in "Paranoia"), Max Martini (last seen in "The Tender Bar"), Kevin Vance (last seen in "End of Watch"), Mark Schlegel, Olivia Williams (last seen in "Man Up"), Harold Perrineau (last seen in "Snitch"), Ned Yousef (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Mireille Enos (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Maurice Compte (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Michael Monks (last seen in "Street Kings"), Jaime FitzSimons (ditto), Tim Ware (last seen in "Till"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), B.J. Winfrey (last seen in "Brothers"), Kendrick Cross (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Hakim Callender (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Troy Garity (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Morgan Alexandria, Jermaine Holt, Everton Lawrence, Neko Parham (last seen in "Ant-Man"), DeWayne Calhoun, Maia Moss-Fife (last seen in "Gifted"), Parisa Johnston (last seen in "The Divergent Series: Allegiant"), Julie Ivey (ditto), Alan Gilmer (last seen in "We're the Millers"), Catherine Dyer (last seen in "Reptile"), Patrick Johnson (last seen in "Project Almanac"), Maya Santandrea, Paul Anthony Barreras, Amy Parrish (last seen in "Haunted Mansion"), Andrew Comrie-Picard, Rus Blackwell (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Jim Recznik

RATING: 4 out of 10 booby traps around the cabin

Hart's War

Year 18, Day 249 - 9/6/26 - Movie #5,423

BEFORE: I can't stop now if I'm going to make it to the start of the horror block (Shock Block) on time, there are the same number of films to get through as there are days left in September - so to take anything even like a skip day, I would have to either double up or have watched a movie or two in advance already. The first one is quite difficult, but I just may have done the latter. But there's still another couple weeks to go before I can take even that kind of a break. Must keep moving, must keep watching, really there's no excuses because I've got like four or five days off in a row, and we're not going anywhere on this long weekend, so really, screw the beach and screw the cookouts, just stay home and watch movies, it's really cost effective. Maybe we'll go out to dinner tomorrow, but early "old person" dinner around 4 pm, you know, after the lunch crowd has cleared out and before the dinner rush shows up. 

Bruce Willis carries over again from "Gasoline Alley". 

THE PLOT: A lieutenant during World War II is captured and asked to defend a black prisoner of war falsely accused of murder. 

AFTER: I wish I could have landed this one on Veterans Day or Memorial Day, but the chain wanted me to put this on Labor Day Weekend. I guess the chain wanted to remind me and everyone reading this how hard our armed forces work to keep us safe. That's a job, being in the army or navy or Marines or Coast Guard, so we're going to add that to the mental checklist this week, yesterday was detectives and porn filmmakers and tattoo artists, and those people work hard too. But probably not has hard as the people in our Armed Forces, so we salute them on this (almost) Labor Day. 

I get the same vibe from this one as I did "Gasoline Alley", which is that this is exactly the type of film that you might watch after you've watched over 5,400 other ones, like no way is "Hart's War" a top priority for anyone to watch, not now and not in 2002 when it was released. It's low priority across the board, partially because it feels like a collection of plot points from OTHER World War II films, which is my way of saying that I feel like I've seen all of this before in better movies. There are parts that remind me of "The Great Escape", which of course is a great classic movie and I'll watch parts of it whenever it's on, I don't care if it's four hours long or whatever, if that's on TCM, well then please don't disturb me for the next four hours. I don't even care that I've seen it fifty or sixty or a hundred times, I love that movie. (Similarly, there was a "Star Wars" marathon on TBS this weekend, and I'm glad I found out about it so late, because otherwise, you know, there goes my weekend. I only re-watched most of Episode III, which is probably the one I've seen the fewest number of times, except maybe for Episode IX.)

But sure, you might say that all movies with World War II P.O.W.'s might share some things in common, clashing with the Nazis, trying to escape the camp, enduring terrible conditions, etc. But then there's another part that reminds me of "Red Tails", because a prominent character is a member of the Tuskegee Airmen. If you could imagine one of those airmen being shot down and then brought to a POW camp in Germany, you might imagine he would then have to bunk with other American servicemen, some who might be from non-integrated parts of the country, and who would be uneasy about or unwilling to share their space with a black man. It's not that hard to imagine especially since some areas of the country didn't pass any civil rights legislation until well after World War II, and racism of course has never fully gone away. 

Other parts reminded me a bit of "Hogan's Heroes", especially how easy it was for the Americans to sneak out of the barracks whenever they needed to, either to ransack the German supplies or get what they needed to continue working on their tunnel. What we don't know at first, of course, is that Col. McNamara has a reason for everything that he does, whether it's putting Lt. Hart in the enlisted man's barracks so that he'll find out everything taking place there, or using the camp musical revue as a distraction to keep working on the tunnel. But when Staff Sgt. Bedford is found dead, and Lt. Scott (one of the black airmen) is accused of killing him, there's a decision to stage an American-style murder trial, in order to prevent the Nazis from just executing Scott outright - I mean, there's always a CHANCE that he didn't do it, and McNamara thinks this will serve as an even larger distraction to keep the Nazis away from the in-progress tunnel. 

The commandant agrees to the trial, perhaps he is very curious about the American legal system and wants to see it in action, and Lt. Hart is called upon to be Scott's attorney, because he made it through two years of law school before enlisting or being drafted. However, Hart's defense starts to lean on the fact that Bedford was trading items with the Nazis, and of course the commandant doesn't need to know about this, so McNamara is forced to inform Hart that the whole trial is a sham, a distraction, the outcome doesn't matter, it's only meant to keep the enemy's focus in one place so they won't be snooping around anywhere else. Any suggestion during the trial that an American POW was collaborating with guards for any reason might not be what the commandant wants to hear, so Lt. Hart is not really able to defend his "client" to the best of his ability. Hart suspects that it was in fact McNamara who killed Bedford, because he was planning an escape of his own, which would have jeopardized the plan to get a large number of Americans out. 

On the last day of the trial, the men planning to escape pretend to have food poisoning, but instead they're preparing to get out of the camp and blow up the nearby ammunition plant, which is a key military target, on their way out. This would not only strike a blow against the Nazi war effort, but also could allow the Americans to get further away from the camp while the Germans dealt with the burning building. It's not a terrible plan, but McNamara eventually realizes that there will be retaliation against the men who were left behind - starting with Hart, who confesses to killing Bedford himself to try to cause a mistrial. However, when the commandant notices that there are fewer prisoners present at the trial than usual, he kind of puts two and two together and threatens to execute everyone participating in the trial. It's only when McNamara comes back and takes full responsibility for the escape plot, essentially sacrificing himself, that the commandant decides to focus his retribution on the mastermind of the plot and spare the others. Well, really, all of the prisoners have value, they can be traded for the release of German prisoners - nobody really knows that the war's going to end in three months, but maybe they've got some kind of feeling about that. 

You could consider watching this movie as a time-saver, before some streaming service like Netflix turns this into a 3-season series with 36 episodes. The plot is at least that complex, it could easily be expanded to series length, just add a few more twists and turns. Would we NEED that? Of course not, but they're already remaking the "Harry Potter" films as a series of mini-series, and further long-form adaptations of short-form movies are on the way. 

Directed by Gregory Hoblit (director of "Untraceable" and "Primal Fear")

Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "The Banshees of Inisherin"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "Awake"), Cole Hauser (last seen in "Tears of the Sun"), Marcel Iures (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Linus Roache (last seen in "The Wings of the Dove"), Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "Deep Cover" (1992)), Maury Sterling (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Sam Jaeger (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Scott Michael Campbell (last seen in "Small Town Saturday Night"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "Encounter"), Sebastian Tillinger (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Rick Ravanello (last seen in "Nick Fury: Agent of Shield"), Adrian Grenier (last seen in "Affairs of State"), Michael Weston (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Joe Spano (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Sam Worthington (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Brad Hunt (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Rualdhri Conroy (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Tony Devlin, Michael Landes (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), David Barrass (last seen in "Flawless"), Gary Gold (last seen in "The Whole Nine Yards"), Danny Babington, Holger Handtke (last seen in "Enemy at the Gates"), Dan van Husen (ditto), Grey Williams, Rene Ifrah, Steve Sarossy, Rocky Marshall (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens"), Christian Kahrmann, Jim Boeven, Georg Vietje, Lukas Kantor, Jakub Zdenek, Jan Nemejovsky (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Jan Marsik, Bohumil Svarc (last seen in "The Omen" (2006)), Jiri Marla Sieber (last seen in "Blade II"), Dugald Bruce-Lockhart (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Jan Jakubec, Michael Beran, Grant George

RATING: 5 out of 10 frozen corpses from the Battle of the Bulge