Film review: Sabotage (15)

ONCE he was The Terminator, then The Governator. Now Arnold Schwarzenegger is struggling to pull his career out of The Refrigerator with movies designed to remind us of the glory days when he chomped cigars and one-liners, while modifying our action expectation from a megastar now pushing 67.

Arnold Swarzenegger in "Sabotage" Picture: Contributed

Sabotage (15)

**

In Sabotage, Arnie still wears sunglasses and tells people off for having “48 per cent body fat”, while a clumsy bit of business flags up his legendary status, by having practically every law enforcer act as if Beyoncé has just walked into the room. Yet since Schwarzenegger has the gait of a Golem, most of the running and jumping stuff is left to the rest of his undercover drugbusting unit, all of whom seem to have been offered a “buy one, get one free” deal on neck tattoos.

The team also carry blunt sobriquets such as Monster, Sugar, Neck, Pyro and Tripod – although the only woman in the group (Mireille Enos) has no nickname, despite being the biggest substance-abusing, profanity-spraying badass of them all. Did someone else in another unit have first dibs on Crackers?

Sabotage boils down to a junky, hyperviolent Agatha Christie, where Arnie’s team are bumped off at regular intervals, while detective Olivia Williams tries to find out whodunnit. As an aside, Sabotage is also a film that happily lingers on extremely graphic disembowelments, yet can’t get out of the room fast enough when Arnie is about to have sex.

Siobhan Synnot

On general release