This weekend Arnold Schwarzenegger will be 66 years and eight months old: exactly two-thirds of a century since he arrived on this planet from some far-off steroid asteroid, and about one-third of a century since Conan the Barbarian certified the champion muscle man as a movie star. Though he doesn\u2019t take off his shirt in the new thriller Sabotage, he still looks carved from some alien granite, still walks with a seismic stride, still occupies the center of a film with a sullen, don\u2019t-dare-call-it-silly gravitas that makes the fine craft of movie performing seem like work for a girly-man. He doesn\u2019t act, he just is; and that\u2019s what\u2019s needed in a medium that values charisma over finesse. Unlike the smoother, updated, humanized version \u2014 Dwayne Johnson \u2014 Arnold is his own, old-school special effect: the Rock of Aged.<\/p>\n
After two terms as California\u2019s Governator, Schwarzenegger slipped comfortably back into pictures with The Last Stand, a modern Western, then crammed into the wide screen, as if it were a service elevator, with fellow \u201980s muscle car Sylvester Stallone in Escape Plan. Now he fronts David Ayer\u2019s Sabotage, an enjoyably gruesome throwback to the grindhouse B movies of the \u201970s and \u201980s, Arnold\u2019s early American prime.<\/p>\n
He plays DEA legend John Wharton \u2014 another bland American name (like The Last Stand\u2019s Ray Owens) that seems invented for the Austrian star by some impish official in a witness protection program \u2014 leading a team of undercover agents. They have been accused of stealing $10 million in a Mexican cartel drug bust and, months later, are being murdered, with extreme prejudice, one by one.<\/p>\n
So stalwart is Schwarzenegger\u2019s reputation, and so grim his visage, that Hollywood is afraid to tell him that most action movies now tiptoe toward a prissy PG-13 rating. Sabotage, bless its black heart and atavistic brain, wears the R rating proudly, like Curt Schilling with his bloody sock in the heroic (or catastrophic) 2004 MLB playoffs, when the Red Sox fought back from three games behind to take the Yankees. If Mexican thugs are to be slaughtered, as in the film\u2019s first and last action scenes, their craniums will pop off in instant lobotomies. If a DEA agent is to be killed, he will get nailed to a ceiling, his guts hanging out to entangle investigators (in one of the few movie scenes that justifies the adjective \u201criveting\u201d). This is not your maiden aunt\u2019s or airplane edit of an action film. It\u2019s the real, pulpy deal.<\/p>\n
How \u201980s is Sabotage? Wharton\u2019s rowdy colleagues \u2014 including James \u201cMonster\u201d Murray (Sam Worthington), Joe \u201cGrinder\u201d Phillips (Joe Manganiello), Julius \u201cSugar\u201d Edmonds (Terrence Howard), Tom \u201cPyro\u201d Roberts (Max Martini) and Bryce \u201cTripod\u201d McNeely (Kevin Vance), plus Monster\u2019s red-haired wife Lizzie \u201cNo Nickname\u201d Murray \u2014 spend their down time in a rec (or wreck) room adorned with the famous poster of Reagan as Rambo. Their hobbies are getting stoned and tattooed; they are so devoted to the Method of undercover work that, even off the job, they strut like biker outlaws. In this crimson Agatha Christie mystery, any one of them could be the next victim or \u2014 if the perp is not a Oaxaca drug lord but a DEA insider \u2014 the mastermind killer. (The movie\u2019s third act contains a neck-snapping plot swerve that Ayer will have to explain on the DVD commentary, so the rest of us understand it.)<\/p>\n
Wharton, who goes by \u201cBreacher,\u201d has none of his team\u2019s louche vices. A generation older, he is sobered by mourning: his wife (Catherine Dyer) had been kidnapped, tortured and killed by a cartel baddie who thoughtfully sent Wharton his wife\u2019s snuff video, which our hero studies as if it were the Zapruder film. We are made to watch too, to underline that this time it\u2019s personal and that an action hero has no purer motive than revenge, whatever means he employs to realize it. In this remorseless genre, wives serve only as captives or corpses. Mrs. W is both. She also has to be dead so that Wharton can forge a working and implicitly erotic relationship with the sturdy FBI lady (Olivia Williams) sleuthing the DEA-dead case.<\/p>\n
Ayer, who wrote the script with Skip Woods, has spent more movie time with rogue cops than an Internal Affairs investigator. He wrote Training Day, with Denzel Washington as the slippery malefactor, and directed Street Kings, in which Keanu Reeves was the officer working outside the rules. (Reeves also had a dead wife to avenge.) Ayer\u2019s last film, End of Watch, was a gritty, dewy tribute to the L.A.P.D. that ran aground in its faux found-footage format. Sabotage is more conventional in its camera style, more vivid and cynical in its appreciation of the resources a man (or woman) needs to carry a gun in the name of the law and decides who dies.<\/p>\n
The movie answers a few questions that rarely get asked but have piquant answers. Like: How do you keep a body you buried at sea from floating to the surface? (By binding it in chicken wire.) Long on heated insult and short on banter, the dialogue avoids punch lines even when they\u2019re expected. The DEA inquiry into the lost $10 million is suddenly dropped, and Wharton\u2019s superior (Martin Donovan) asks, \u201cDo you have a photo of a Congressman f\u2014ing a goat?\u201d You expect him to reply, \u201cI\u2019ve got a hundred of them,\u201d but he flashes a tight smile, which may be a grimace, and remains mute.<\/p>\n
Arnold does get to accuse one overweight inquisitor of having \u201c48 percent body fat.\u201d The flab level of Sabotage is considerably lower. For those who wishes they could have sat in on the enhanced interrogation of terror suspects, it\u2019s a decent ride \u2014 familiar, massive and watchable, like the Easter Island statue who stars in it. Happy next third of a century, you brute. May your brand of B movie never be terminated.