Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in one bomb that Osama Bin Laden can't take credit for.

Collateral Damage
Warner Bros., 2002
Directed by Andrew Davis

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Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest action film, Collateral Damage, was put on the shelf after September 11th. It should have stayed there.

But no, Warner Bros. has gone ahead and inflicted it upon us, and in the process, revealed their marketing instincts were all wrong. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the studio worried that it was not the kind of movie America wanted to see. On the contrary -- it's exactly the kind of movie America wants to see right now. And they would've wanted it even more a few months ago. Ah-nuld, America's action hero (even though he's Austrian), plays a firefighter who kills terrorists. This movie may be incredibly dumb, but it's definitely a crowd pleaser.

Arnie plays an average American guy -- a regular Joe who just happens to have a thick accent that's never explained. His character works as an L.A. firefighter until his wife and young son end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He watches in horror as a terrorist bomb explodes along a street, claiming their lives. The perpetrator, it seems, is a Colombian guerrilla named, "The Wolf". Arnie wants the CIA to go down there, track down The Wolf and avenge his family. When they don't, he decides (naturally) to go kick butt himself.

The pre-film hype promised to give us a Schwarzenegger who wasn't such a Super Man. And at the film's outset, that appears the case. He gets battered and bruised like a normal person during the aforementioned terrorist attack scene. But that's about where his vulnerability ends. In fact, as he descends into the jungles of Colombia's guerrilla zone, he suddenly acquires elaborate paramilitary skills. Before you know it, he's rigging a cocaine factory to explode. I don't think that's the sort of thing you learn in firefighter school.

His skill with weapons isn't the only thing that seems out of character. Wait until you see him mimic Mike Tyson's culinary appetites during one fight scene.

But the biggest problem with Collateral Damage is that it suffers so badly in comparison with reality. Now that we've all lived through the real thing, we look at this movie and see all the inaccuracies. This is a film in which explosions are nice and tidy. There's a fireball that lasts a couple seconds, then quickly clears to reveal an empty room with a couple little pieces of burning debris. If only life were like that.

The film's Clinton Era politics are also dated. When it comes to explaining why Arnie has to become a one-man army, the screenwriters think they can credibly portray the U.S. government as preferring negotiation over action. Does anyone still think we'd respond to a terrorist attack against the U.S. by engaging in peace talks? The choice of Colombian guerrillas as villains also feels cynical. I'm betting the producers decided against Arab terrorists because they feared the kind of backlash that was unleashed against Arnold's True Lies. (If so, it didn't work -- Colombian groups are protesting the film.)

Politics aren't the only thing wrong with the movie. There's the cast: A great actor, John Turturro, is wasted in a cameo as mechanic who's supposedly Canadian, even though he pronounces about like an American. Another cameo by John Leguizamo, as a drug dealer, is mercifully brief.

None of that should affect the box office, though. The movie is lame brained, but it's cathartic enough that it will probably earn everyone a nice pay day.
(c) Copyright 2002

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