Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie “Sabotage” thought us Three things not to build a team with.
The film Sabotage is an altered adaptation of the novel by Agatha Christie entitled And Then There Were None. The film was directed by David Ayer, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as John “Breacher” Wharton.
John “Breacher” Wharton (Arnold Schwarzenegger) leads the DEA Special Operations Team. In the movie, he deals with the world’s deadliest drug cartel. During a raid on the cartel’s warehouse, the team tried to steal $10 million, hid it through the toilet bowl, and burnt the rest to cover their deed.
Meanwhile, they discovered the money was gone when the team returned to the ditch where the toilet pipe ends. At the same time, the conduct of the latest raids was full of discrepancies. Their boss Floyd Demel decided to suspend them and investigate the team for the theft temporarily. After six months, the suspension order was lifted, and that’s where the team started to fall apart.
Greed and Individual Hidden Agenda
The team decided to rob the cartel during the raid as they got greedy and felt the government had short-changed them with their hard work and success. In the process, they stop empathizing and caring for each other. They stop being concerned about the feelings of others. Their lack of genuine interest in the ideas and feelings of others and not willingness to take any responsibility for their behavior and actions make them complicated people to be with. They are never satisfied. They start to slip into the world as a zero-sum game. They are not keen to consider other factors outside money where everyone would benefit as good. They want to have the most significant and suspect others are also thinking the same. They genuinely believe that they deserve more, even if it comes at other team members’ expense. They started to feel that they were experts in manipulation. Thinking that they are highly talented in taking credit for work done by others.
Lack of trust
Team members started to question John’s integrity and started to feel he might be the one who had stolen the money for this own purpose. In the movie, his wife and son are brutely murdered by the Cartel, and he has been spending money and time to track done the killers but to no avail. They’re also not bonding as a team anymore because they don’t believe when John brings them together. Lizzy, the only lady in the squad, bide her time to form a couple with Sugar instead of Sam, her husband, and decided to go against everyone in the team. In the pursuit of getting their hands on the money, they know no limits. They start to compromise moral values and ethics to achieve their goals. They started killing their own and forming small but opposing groups between them. In the end, both got killed in a car chase. In a real-world scenario, this causes the team to fall apart almost immediately and the project to fail.
Lack of discipline
The team starts to hold people back and fear their actions as everything goes. Without accountability and rules, they began to suffer emotional stress and second guess each other. Each member operates on their own rules, fearing for safety. The team’s awareness and support between team members start to fade. Isolations and escape become the default behavior. In the end, they no longer operate as a team.
In the end, he has achieved his goal, where he kept the money and managed to locate the killers but get his whole crew killed.
