| COLLATERAL DAMAGE Rating:   Director: Andrew Davis Producers: David Foster, Peter MacGregor-Scott, Steven Reuther Screenplay: David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths Director of Photography: Adam Greenberg Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elias Koteas, Francesca Neri, Cliff Curtis, John Leguizamo, John Turturro |
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Review by: Ryan
Kugler
2/7/02
The last twenty minutes of Collateral Damage are vintage Schwarzenegger. We get a great action set piece, an awesome no holds-barred fight with a couple of bad guys, and one or two great lines. It's the first ninety minutes that are the problem here. They're awful. This isn't Arnold's worst movie, that would be either The Last Action Hero or End of Days, but it just might be his most dull and unexciting. To put it simply, I was bored out-of-my mind through most of this.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a Los Angeles fireman who loses his beautiful wife and cute-as-a-button son to a tragic bombing planned and executed by a Columbian terrorist. Arnold knows who was responsible and goes to Columbia to track him down and seek his revenge. Yup, that's it. End of story.
Schwarzenegger is his usual wooden-self, and his accent seems to get thicker with each passing film. He's not the greatest actor, he's not even a good one, but he's fun to watch, and I usually like him. In this, all of his sense of fun is missing. I understand that it's supposed to be a more serious film than his others, but it's so silly, cheesy and over-the-top, with all of the actors playing this as if it's great drama, that I couldn't take any of it seriously.
I liked Cliff Curtis as the terrorist. He's been good in films like Bringing Out the Dead, Three Kings, and Training Day, and in this he's too good for the material. He's actually a villain with some nice depth to his character. John Leguizamo and John Turturro pop up in extended cameos as the comic relief (which you shouldn't need when you have Arnold around), but they don't get the job done. They're way more annoying than funny.
Andrew Davis has really taken a turn for the worse since he directed The Fugitive. First Chain Reaction and now this. I consider the Harrison Ford thriller to be one of the most overrated films ever (Best Picture nod?), but it's definitely the Citizen Kane of his work.
Overall, this plays out like one of those 1980's Cannon films such as Invasion U.S.A. or River of Death, and not a big budget 2002 action film from a major studio. It's also much smaller in scale than any of Schwarzenegger's films since the likes of Raw Deal and Red Heat. Arnold is in what they call a slump. He hasn't been in a good movie since True Lies. His next project is going to be Terminator 3 and let's hope it's a good vehicle for him and not another tired retread, though with James Cameron out of the driver's seat, it's looking doubtful.
I really should be reviewing the Collateral
Damage DVD, as it was originally scheduled to open in theaters
last October. The studio didn't think that it was appropriate
to release a film featuring a terrorist as the antagonist only
one month after the September 11th tragedy, and I suppose that
postponing it a few months was the right thing to do. An even
better move would have been to dump it in the video bins at your
local chain. It will be there soon anyway.
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