So I watch Sabotage, the new Ah-nuld movie last night on DVD. Pee-yew, what a stinker. But what really struck me was the number of severity of the plot holes.
Arnold was the leader of a special DEA team that worked special undercover cases against drug cartels. The movie opens with the team crashing a big money laundering scheme at the fancy party of a drug lord. Lizzy, an undercover officer, is already inside and we can see that the house is quite fancy. Arnold’s team breaks down the door and Lizzy shoots one of the drug guys trying to have sex with her (because, of course, she’s undercover as a prostitute) and jumps out the window.
Then we cut back to Arnold’s team (now joined by Lizzy) advancing into the house, which is no longer a fancy drug lord’s mansion but a dingy storage facility that has lots of bare concrete and trash strewn everywhere. Arnold and his team don’t let the alternate reality they’ve clearly slipped into stop them, so they start stealing some of the money. The plan to steal the money involves grabbing single stacks of bills, wrapping them in plastic, and tying them to a string that the team is feeding down a sewer line. At one point, they give themselves three minutes to get in and out (which they stick to) and say they stole $10,000,000. The only way that’s possible is if each guy on the team wrapped one stack of 100s ($10,000) every second for the entire three minutes. After the three minutes are up, they set fire to the money as this appears to be the real reason for their mission.
Cut to… an FBI investigation into the missing $10,000,000… that was originally part of a much larger that they were ordered to burn. One member of Arnold’s team even pointed out this little plot hole (“How do you know money is missing if you told us to burn it all?”) and the FBI guys just kept right on accusing them of stealing it.
This is film school level stuff. How did these kinds of major errors get into a bigtime Hollywood movie. The actual mechanics of the heist, OK, I can chalk that up to Hollywood time displacement. But the rest is just pathetic.
According to the trivia page in the IMDb, there are at least a couple reasons why it’s a mess. First, the director turned in a version that was almost three hours long and the studio cut about an hour from it. Second, the director offered the studio two different endings for the film. The studio didn’t like either one and insisted the director film a third ending that they then used:
I read that on IMDB, which just further complicates things. If all we’re talking about is a different ending, then the two proposed “original” endings open up even more plot holes. Arnold can’t be behind it all because he’s shown as the victim of several attacks at that point. Including one where his supposed co-conspirators chase him with a machine gun.
As for the three-hour cut, while it may have been better, there was no mystery here. I wasn’t surprised at all when Lizzy turned out to be the traitor. They practically telegraph it from the beginning.
My guess would be that the pitch of “Arnold Schwarzenegger as leader of a DEA team” gets the green light as a movie, and the script is written as an afterthought. Isn’t that how Hollywood usually works?
Who knows what happened? Sometimes a movie will go ahead with filming even though the script is unfinished. The lead actor, the director, the writer, and the producers will disagree about what sort of movie they’re making, sometimes in rather basic ways. But they will go ahead because there’s a lot of money committed to the project, the actors and director are ready to go and on a tight schedule, and they decided they’re sure that the film can make a lot of money, despite the vagueness about what it’s going to be like. Yeah, this is kind of stupid, but it happens. Sometimes the film actually turns out to be good anyway, and sometimes it turns out to be a mess:
They didn’t burn the money- Arnold placed a duffel bad full of explosives next to it and shot it to set it off. It blew the money everywhere and partially burned them.
Lizzy doesn’t ask how they know how much money is missing since it was burned; she asks “It was a big, giant, fuckin’ stack of money. How do you know exactly down to the dollar was in that room?” She is then told that the FBI was carrying on a parallel investigation.
It might be a slight stretch to ask the audience to believe the FBI could know that $10,000,000 didn’t get fully burned and is instead missing and that a mansion has really shitty concrete tunnels in them, but I wouldn’t call them plot holes. They’re pretty ordinary leaps of belief one has to take when watching an action movie. Getting stacks of bills that equal 10,000,000 down a drain pipe in three minutes is an even bigger stretch, but I’m not sure that qualifies as a plot hole, either.
Yes, it matters. You said they burned the money and that one of them pointed out that plot hole by asking how they know how much money there was if it was burned. Me pointing out that neither of those things happened matters.
Bad guys building a concrete fortress on one end of a mansion they party in isn’t a plot hole.