Collateral Damage, the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger wham-bam-thank-you-more-bam flick, arrives on the scene wielding enough heavy baggage to drag an ocean liner to the bottom of the deep blue sea. Originally primed for an October 5, 2001, release but yanked from the schedule following 9/11, this new action yarn from The Fugitive director Andrew Davis, in which a firefighter seeks revenge on the terrorist who killed his family, immediately became the poster child for the ongoing debate on how Hollywood should start treating scripts with terrorism themes. This particular picture was shot and completed before 9/11, of course, but its timing couldn’t help but make it Ground Zero for endless discourses on whether similar enterprises will be viewed as cathartic escapism that help ease individual suffering and elevate national pride, or as insensitive, exploitative junk that will play right into the global image of Hollywood (and, by extension, America) as a soulless land of capitalists who worship the bottom line. Without question, delaying the movie’s release was the right thing to do, but is it OK to present this thing now, or should it have been shelved for infinity and beyond?
In the middle of this raging dialogue, it’s almost incidental whether or not Collateral Damage is a good movie. For the record, it’s not: Rather, it’s a working-class model of the standard action flick, with very little to distinguish it from other run-of-the-mill “red meat” movies that periodically test theaters’ Dolby Digital sound systems. The bursts of invention that propelled earlier Arnie extravaganzas like The Terminator and Total Recall have been missing from his more recent output, resulting in curiously morose duds like End of Days and Batman & Robin. The same applies to this one, which finds the big fella cast as Gordy Brewer, an LA firefighter who watches his wife and young son blown to bits in front of his eyes after a public square is decimated by a bomb. The perpetrator turns out to be El Lobo (Cliff Curtis), a Colombian rebel leader tired of American involvement in his country’s ongoing civil wars. Gordy expects the US government to bring down this assassin, but when it becomes clear that no progress is being made, he decides to do the Dirty Harry routine, scooting off to Colombia with the intention of taking out El Lobo himself.
Patriotic fervor is surprisingly kept on a low-burner (though we do get to see Arnie drinking out of a coffee mug emblazoned with the US flag), and the action scenes are competent but commonplace. There are also inconsequential cameos by John Turturro and John Leguizamo, the obligatory third-act plot twist, and several Arnold quips that land with all the delicacy of a hippo tossed from a condo rooftop. None of it interested me much, but I will defend Hollywood’s right to present it.
It’s often a tricky business, finding this faded line between moral decency and debauchery. It’s also an entirely subjective field: After all, one person’s Natural Born Killers may be another’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, to name but two titles that have been targets of vocal minorities hellbent on vilifying them for their presumed evil bent. But to say that Collateral Damage (not to mention any like-minded upcoming films) is morally offensive simply because of its subject matter would force us to go back and denounce all terrorist and/or vigilante pictures that simply had the benefit of better timing, from Death Wish to Die Hard. For that matter, wouldn’t we then be forced to condemn the endless stream of World War II pictures that flooded the nation from the 40s through the 60s? After all, these movies were specifically created as a reaction to a tragedy that was occurring on a gargantuan scale. (Personally, nothing about Collateral Damage offended me half as much as Behind Enemy Lines, which was rushed into theaters last fall in a blatant attempt to score some cash off the jingoistic zeal.)
Certainly, some people will view Collateral Damage and, heightened by the events of last year (the bomb scene is indeed unsettling to watch), feel offended by what they perceive as sensationalizing a serious matter. I’m no stranger to such emotions myself: I was deeply offended, for example, by last year’s 15 Minutes, which seemed like an exercise in senseless bloodletting made more repugnant by the filmmakers’ obvious snow job in trying to make us believe we were watching a movie of searing insight (mass murderers are bad — yeah, I never would have figured that out on my own). But whether these movies are good, bad or indifferent, whether they’re cathartic to some and traumatic to others, they should still get prepped, produced and proffered to the marketplace. Curtailing them in any way would be an act of homegrown terrorism as frightening as anything Hollywood’s playmakers could ever envision.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2002.
