COLLATERAL DAMAGE
½
Hasta la vista, terrorists
Running time: 102 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity). At the Astor Plaza, the Chelsea, the Union Square, others.
‘COLLATERAL Damage,” a terrorist revenge thriller with Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a cathartic piece of wish fulfillment that will probably strike a chord with Americans – even if it’s far from a great movie.
Shot well before Sept. 11 and originally scheduled for release last October until the World Trade Center attack made that a touchy proposition, it’s become the season’s most topical movie, as well, in some ways, the most dated.
It rather chillingly recalls, in B-movie terms, that now-bygone innocent era when a terrorist could march right up to a sensitive building – in this case a skyscraper containing both the Colombian consulate and CIA headquarters in Los Angeles – and set off a bomb.
Unfortunately for the terrorists, the victims of the attack (which gives every indication of being toned down in the wake of Sept. 11) include the wife and young son of Gordy Brewer, the hero fireman played by Schwarzenegger.
Since the film takes places in a pre-Sept. 11 world where American officials typically shrugged off retaliation for such attacks in the name of diplomacy, Gordy is on his way to South American before you can say hasta la vista, in hot pursuit of a terrorist called El Lobo (Cliff Curtis).
While there are some of the usual cartoonish heroics – escaping a hail of machine gun bullets and plunging from a waterfall without a scratch for starters – this is overall a more serious Schwarzenegger than usual.
There are none of his usual trademark wisecracks (were they edited out?) – and his revenge mission carries more gravity simply because of real-life events that transpired after the movie was shot.
Arnie is up to the challenge with an OK performance, and he gets some very solid help from Curtis, Italian actress Francesca Neri as El Lobo’s mysterious wife and Elias Koteas as a shady CIA agent (another now-dated stereotype).
There are also entertaining cameos by John Leguizamo as a Colombian drug lord and John Turturro as a Canadian mechanic.
The screenplay, attributed to David and Peter Griffith, really pushes things when Gordy returns to the U.S. to stop El Lobo from bombing a Washington landmark.
Why wouldn’t authorities evacuate the target when it’s identified? Why would there be pipes filled with explosive gases in the basement of CIA headquarters?
But the truth is, your heart will have you cheering Gordy on – even as your brain complains that there are plot holes you could drive a truck bomb through.
It doesn’t hurt at all that director Andrew Davis (“The Fugitive”) keeps things moving at a brisk pace and stages the action sequences with only slightly subdued elan.
Warner Bros. has somewhat tastelessly linked the premiere of “Collateral Damage” to the real-life Twin Towers tragedy.
They didn’t need to – the movie’s theme and history pretty much guaranteed it will clean up at the box office.
More big-screen terror attacks
“COLLATERAL Damage” is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood thrillers that eerily foretold a major terrorist attack on American soil before Sept. 11.
The prescience goes back more than a decade to the first “Die Hard” movie and includes its two sequels, as well as “Under Siege,” “Air Force One” “True Lies” and countless other examples.
At least two more major terrorist-themed films completed before Sept. 11 are in the pipeline for this summer.
“The Sum of All Fears,” from a Tom Clancy best seller with Ben Affleck, is a thriller about an explosives-laden blimp at the Super Bowl; the comedy “Bad Company” has Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins as CIA agents trying to prevent a stolen nuclear bomb from being detonated “somewhere in America.”