Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Gordy Brewer, a courageous Los Angeles firefighter and loving family man who loses his wife and young son in an explosion triggered by El Lobo (Cliff Curtis), a Colombian rebel targeting Colombian government officials. When the FBI and the State Department won't make tracking down El Lobo a priority, Gordy journeys to Colombia himself to avenge his family's death. However, El Lobo's power as a rebel leader makes Gordy's quest difficult, as most of the locals are in thrall to the terrorist. Eventually, the action swings back to Washington, D.C., where El Lobo threatens to detonate more bombs.
Writers David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths, working from a story credited to them and Ronald Roose, cannot be blamed for failing to anticipate history. However, everybody in the audience now has an excellent idea of how the U.S. government would respond to a bombing on U.S. soil by a foreign national and it's not with wait-and-see indifference. Moreover, the script's stab at creating moral complexity is so half-hearted and rote (cynical U.S. officials, corrupt trigger-happy Colombian soldiers and drug-dealing peasants) that we wind up wishing they'd simply picked a side, so that there would be some hope of at least a few colorful supporting characters. The movie reaches a sort of nadir in the moral ambiguity department when Gordy, in trying to kill El Lobo, nearly blows up a little boy his son's age Gordy bonds with the child, but neither he nor the movie ever appear to notice any parallels.
New Zealand Arnold Schwarzenegger traverses the jungles of Columbia in COLLATERAL DAMAGE © 2002 Warner Bros.actor Curtis plays the South American villain with swagger and conviction. John Turturro as an imprisoned, apolitical mechanic and John Leguizamo as a pragmatic cocaine merchant are enjoyable in small roles, but this is a film of few grace notes.
The action, it should be said, is reasonably vigorous, energetically directed by Andrew Davis and played full throttle on the soundtrack (when something explodes onscreen, the seats in the theatre thump sympathetically). Schwarzenegger seems as fit as ever, so viewers who like watching him pound on baddies without caring greatly about the whys or wherefores should be relatively diverted. Everyone else, though, is likely to be annoyed by everything from the script's coincidences and contrivances to the you've-got-to-be-kidding jolts derived from horror movie techniques of having characters who we know ought to be dead (because we've seen the extent of their injuries) spring back up for more mayhem.
There's been a lot of discussion as to whether or not screen explosions can still be seen as mere entertainment. COLLATERAL DAMAGE is not the film to answer that question it's so formulaic that we feel like we've seen it a hundred times before. It's impossible to even be disturbed by it.
Reviewed Format: Theatrical Release | ||
Rated: R | ||
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cliff Curtis, Francesca Neri, Elias Koteas | ||
Writers: David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths, story by Ronald Roose and David Griffiths & Peter Griffiths | ||
Director: Andrew Davis | ||
Distributor: Warner Bros. | ||
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