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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
There are many reasons to protest this Arnold Schwarzenegger flick about firemen and terrorists. The best one is that it's a bad movie.
Feb 8, 2002 | Colombians and firefighters are all worked up about "Collateral Damage," the new action thriller in which Arnold Schwarzenegger saves the United States from South American terrorists with a fireman's ax and the concerned furrows on his monumental forehead. There are also some Catholic priests who are gravely concerned about it, for reasons that evade me. But if we're going to have protests against this movie, I can think of some other groups who might as well get a piece of the action: Canadians, fans of John Turturro and John Leguizamo (whose talents are squandered herein), both foreign policy hawks and doves and the screenwriters of the "Phantasm" horror series.
Come to think of it, Schwarzenegger and director Andrew Davis ought to get out there on the picket lines too. "Collateral Damage" was never destined to be anything beyond a standard-issue action spectacle, energetic in a superficial way but afflicted with the terminal hollowness and vagueness of a Hollywood movie confronting geopolitics. Its accidental confluence with history is nothing more than ugly coincidence, and the extra weight it now seems to carry isn't doing the movie any favors -- as art or entertainment or anything else. Audiences who might have relished "Collateral Damage" as a two-hour escape from anything approaching reality will now be asked, by op-ed pundits and windbag critics like me, to think about it. To the barricades!
Davis is a former journalist with a sharp eye for gritty details and dramatic moments that lend his grand, implausible spectacles a sort of realistic finish. Of course it's ludicrous -- and even, in the current context, grotesque -- that Los Angeles firefighter Gordon Brewer (Schwarzenegger), on his own, pursues the terrorists who killed his wife and son into the heart of the Colombian jungle. But once we're there, Davis almost makes us believe it. In one harrowing scene when a group of bus passengers flee on foot from a bunch of sinister-looking guys with cellphones and AK-47s at a checkpoint -- maybe they're government and maybe they 're rebels; it hardly seems to matter -- the terror and anarchy of civil war are brilliantly distilled.
A few moments later, Gordon plunges down a hillside into a river and then is carried through a gorge and over a prodigious waterfall in an eye-popping sequence that strongly resembles Harrison Ford's famous dam-dive scene in Davis' own "The Fugitive." I guess the man's entitled to rip himself off, but what the scene makes clear is that "Collateral Damage" isn't about terrorism or Colombia or firefighters. It belongs to the closed world of action movies and not to the so-called real world; it's a collection of borrowed scenes, signifiers, attitudes and tropes.
We've got the traumatized American, abandoned by his own government, who goes to war by himself; a Third World country full of cigars, corruption and exotic forms of torture (some guy gets force-fed a poisonous snake!); a vulnerable woman and child in a war zone; a mean-spirited, imitation-Hitchcock plot switcheroo; and a villain who is apparently impossible to kill. (And, as I will mention for the second and final time, the following dialogue lifted, perhaps unconsciously, from the "Phantasm" films. Hero, preparing to vanquish Unkillable Villain: "It's over!" Unkillable Villain: "It's never over!")
Schwarzenegger has been making movies for a long time now; he's a pretty good actor until he opens his mouth. Early in the film, after Gordon is injured in the downtown Los Angeles bombing that kills his wife and son, his portrayal of a regular guy who has lost everything he cares about is surprisingly moving. Of course, you have to wonder why some guy from L.A. named Gordon talks like a Tyrolean robot, but that's par for any Arnold movie.
