Collateral Damage

Now it can be told why Warner Bros. decided not to release "Collateral Damage" on its original date of October 5. It wasn't just the plot, although that would be pretty damning in itself for a film coming out about a month after September 11, 2001: Firefighter Gordon Brewer, played by that symbol of American pride Arnold Schwarzenegger, loses his wife and son to a terrorist attack carried out by Carlos "The Wolf" Perrini (Cliff Davis). The Wolf wants American soldiers out of Colombia, where they are currently fighting Colombia guerrillas (in real life, too), and he has decided to "bring the war to America" until we imperialists realize the deadly error of our ways.

Sound familiar? There is, of course, one difference: In the real world, it takes a nation mobilizing behind thousands of dedicated men and women to even begin to defeat a terrorist organization. In "Collateral Damage," it takes one man, as long as he's got his wits, his muscle, some extremely deadly objects lying around while he fights, and a twenty-million-dollar paycheck. This too might seem obscene in the wake of the attacks - vigilante justice doled out to unwashed foreigners by musclebound 'Mericans - but it's not the real reason the film absolutely could not have been released on October 5 of last year.

The real kicker is what Brewer finds when he takes the fight to Colombia, to navigate hostile territory and overcome his status as Public Gringo No. 1 so that he can get to and kill Perrini. He finds Perrini, but he also finds: moral ambiguity. Yes, "Collateral Damage" dares to suggest that just because certain elements of the CIA take a desperate pleasure in blowing up camps full of women and children, the terrorists may have a point when they speak of moral equivalency.

After the utterly predictable setup, in which we meet Brewer's family for just long enough to establish that they have achieved supreme domestic tranquility and make them recognizable when they eventually die, these scenes - soft whispers from troubled souls, and hard snarls from souls that should be troubled - shock us to the core. No matter what else we expect in a Schwarzenegger movie, the last thing we want or need is someone telling us that Schwarzenegger may not be entirely right in his carefully considered program of killing all the evil people.

Even Schwarzenegger appears baffled by this turn of events. He acquits himself well in the opening instant action scene, and in a few other scenes where he can display his unmatched ability to communicate rage by smashing things and people. But when Perrini poses the complex question of who is to blame, he hesistates for a moment before mauling the Wolf's guards with wonderfully authoritative, decisively powerful strokes. Yet Schwarzie doesn't really have the acting ability to take the argument in; he's not internalizing the moral debate when he listens to the other side, just staring blankly until the speech is over.

Director Andrew Davis, however, seems much more interested in the moral debate than the fight scenes, considering the lazy, confusing editing he lets slip onto the screen for the brawling and chasing. And screenwriters Ronald Roose and David and Peter Griffiths actually pen some fairly moving dialogue for those who question the black-and-white moral view that we all expected to be upheld in Schwarzenegger movies. But it doesn't quite register with us because it doesn't quite register with Arnold; we expect him to find a milieu in which he is comfortable before the film ends.

Not to reveal everything, but the moral dilemmas posed earlier do in fact become a lot simpler, and this film ends up a standard Schwarzenegger vehicle, albeit one with more time spent on the exposition and development and not enough on the final fight scene. This final fight finds Arnold in superb ass-kicking form, as he delivers blow after blow to the body of evil with a solidity that will rouse all but the clinically insensate. Even the disgusting aftertaste of hearing a news broadcaster speak the phrase "first terrorist attack on our nation's capital" (hello, Editing Department? You're fired) can't quite erase the kinetic satisfaction of this closing battle. But this battle also casts off the ambition that preceded it; it's a retreat for the filmmakers even as it's the final advance for Brewer.

What we end up having seen in "Collateral Damage" is a curious collection of parts that Arnold, as extraordinary a testosteronal specimen as he is, doesn't quite have the skill to unify. It's not jingoistic, it's not unpatriotic, it's not so very complicated, it's just confused. We were not in the mood for this kind of confusion one month after September 11. Despite the occasional intriguing moments and the always-rousing fights, it's an open question whether anyone will be in the mood for "Collateral Damage" now.

GET ON THE BUS

I currently [February 2001] have a cold, which I came down with last night, while I was watching "Collateral Damage." When I got home last night, I was amazingly tired. I decided to just write the review for thirty minutes, while the plan I had formulated for it while riding the bus home was still fresh in my mind and my ideas were (presumably) more directly shaped by the film. Wherever I was in thirty minutes, I reasoned, I could pick it up from there tonight.

I wrote the entire 820-word review above in 25 minutes, and just now spent five minutes editing it.

This leads me to the conclusion: Public transportation is awesome. If I had been driving a car home, I would have had to concentrate on the road, and my mind would not have been free to craft this diabolical plan (which, to boot, is different from how I write most of my reviews). Yet while on the 1 bus to Silver Spring, even as I nodded off occasionally, I still managed to put together a workable plan, and then some subroutine in my brain took over and produced the review you see above. Without the bus, no review, me still sick and tired. Checkmate, automobiles.

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