Sabotage by Tibor Takács is one the most underrated action movies of the ‘90s that action and thriller fans can still dig up from a pile of buried gems in the history of Canadian cinema. The movie had a TV premier in the U.S. and to date has no Wikipedia page, which leaves you wondering why.
Sabotage happens inside the world of intelligence agencies, spies, secret missions, arms trafficking, and above everything else, assassinations. Mark Dacascos stars as Michael Bishop, an intel agent and trained combatant who survives an attempt on his life by another assassin Jason Sherwood (Tony Todd) in the Serb-Bosnia region. Years later, he would run into Sherwood again while hired to be the bodyguard of an arms dealer (Richard Coulter). An FBI agent Louise Castle (Carrie-Anne Moss) is assigned to the case of the dealer’s killing while Bishop continues his hunt.
For the movie’s action content, there’s more shootout than physical combat which could be a disappointment if the viewer is in for Dacascos’s martial arts moves. But he does show it in a few scenes; in the movie’s setting, business with guns actually brings more realism. The merit of the movie is not overdoing it.
Both the plot and dialogue are up to the mark with more revealed as the story moves ahead and some snappy exchanges between the two protagonists keep it heated. The plot keeps the mystery of the hand that feeds the assassination chain until the end. And the viewer is left guessing how Dacascos became the chessmate of Professor Follenfant (John Neville).
The average IMDb rating of Sabotage is a little under 6 when it could easily have been 7 or close. The B-Action tag on the movie’s genre doesn’t really fit. How much politics is involved in keeping this movie underrated – if any – for showing the U.S. government involved in arms and assassination business in war zones? In other words, has the movie’s rating been sabotaged? You decide!
