Review of Collateral Damage (2002) by Jordan R — 29 May 2009

Not bad, and certainly not the suck-fest that I heard it postured as. Ah-nold plays (somewhat) against type as Gordy Brewer, an LA firefighter of quietly superheroic stature. The thing I liked most about the Brewer character is that he stays mostly true to the fireman's ethos - he doesn't, as a general rule, kill people, except in the case of El Lobo, whose glaring need for death drives Brewer's motivation and the whole plot of the film. Brewer turns unexpectedly Mike Tyson brutal in a really desperate corner - dude bites a guy's ear off.

Prepare for the most moral ambiguity you'll ever see in an Ah-nold film, as El Lobo turns out to be a guy who's been done wrong by "collateral damage" as well, and actually gets his five minutes to say WHY he kills innocent Americans to make his point. He's still full of crap and evil, evil, evil, but at least he has a clearly defined set of motives.

Some interesting bit parts, particularly by John Leguizamo (super-annoying), John Turturro (funny and interesting, should've been Ah-nold's second banana), and Elias Koteas (his character's ambiguity is one of the more interesting things about the film, although that self-satisfied smirk is moving into Guy Pearce territory). Oh, and prepare to see a non-Terminator Ah-nold solidly out-act one of the major leads. Francesca Neri is cute, but that's it. That weird lip thing she does apparently covers every emotion ever, because that's all you're gonna see.

Things of note: Ah-nold does not BLLLEAAARGGGGHROWWWWGH KILL EVERYBODY, he never uses a gun, comes up with some clever (if improbable) stuff to get things done. Also, there is a lot of BLLLEAAAARGGGGHROWWWGH in the movie, including one part where he's doing it so loudly, it actually warns one of the baddies that he's approaching. An Ah-nold alarm, if you like.

There are also some really, really, really bad special effects toward the end. Explosion. Axe. Good grief. This from the guy who starred in T2, one of the most revolutionary SFX pictures ever made. Sigh.