Movie of the Week: Collateral Damage

Movie: Collateral Damage, 2002
Watched on BluRay, Playstation 3

I've been writing a lot of sports-related articles recently, and I wanted to go in a different direction with this post. Movie of the Week will be a recurring column that rotates writers and will span all genres. This week, in the inaugural edition of the MotW, I ventured into my favorite film genre: action movies. So, without further adieu, here's my take on Collateral Damage, a 2002 Arnold Schwarzenegger flick.

Until today, I had never seen Collateral Damage in its entirety. I'm a huge fan of action movies of all sorts, as those of you who know me can attest, but this movie was pretty underwhelming. Ahnold is a great action movie actor, partially because he is such a poor actor in general, and generally mediocre acting is (at least for me) an action movie staple. But the Governator (who actually didn't become Governor of Cal-ee-four-nyeah until a year later, in 2003) seemed disinterested and aloof in his portrayal of firefighter/hero Gordy Brewer. Campy acting is good in action flicks, but this was more in the category of careless acting, which is never a good thing. The rest of the cast is similarly lacking in ability, and don't really convince as their fairly cliched character archetypes. John Leguizamo plays an annoying Latino stereotype, who thankfully is dispatched via headshot about halfway through the film. The main bad guy, a Colombian terrorist named the Wolf, is lacking in inspiration and really doesn't make me feel any emotions about him whatsoever. I love action movie villains in the vein of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) from Die Hard or Russian terrorist Ivan Korshunov (Gary Oldman) of Air Force One. Those characters, and their fantastic portrayals, elicited a reaction from me, whether it was 'Oh man, that guy is such a badass' or 'He is really an evil dude', but the Wolf just made me tune out when he was on screen.

This guy sucks.

Enough about the acting, though. Nobody (in their right mind) watches an action movie like Collateral Damage solely for the acting ability of the people involved; we watch for the explosions, gunfights, and epic set pieces that are the cornerstones of any good blockbuster action movie. The movie delivers on some of these aspects, but flops spectacularly in others. There are very few large action scenes in this movie, and they are pretty overdone with explosions and unimpressive special effects, but not in a good way. There are movies that overdo the special effects to campy levels (e.g. The Expendables), which I love, but Collateral Damage seems to take itself too seriously. Many of the scenes involving any sort of excitement are smaller, one-on-one type of fights or hit-and-run terrorist attacks, which aren't always well-done. Arnold carries the fight scenes by (as usual) defeating fairly overwhelming odds, and literally biting a man's ear clean off his head, a Mike Tyson patented move. The violence is very tame for an R rated film (I really have no idea why it's not PG-13), but I think much of that is due to the subject matter of the movie and the fact that the film was slated to come out less than a month after 9/11. The release was pushed back until February 2002, so I'm sure they cut out some particularly eerie scenes (like the one where Sofia Vergara is supposed to hijack a plane) to make it more palatable for audiences. I don't fault the studio for doing what they had to do, but the movie suffers as a result.

The action is really only a symptom of a larger problem: the plot of this movie is ill-conceived and honestly quite poorly explained. There is minimal backstory given to any of the characters, other than the requisite 'Ahnold watched his wife & kid blow up so now he's mad' opening scene. The terrorist's main motivation is really not fleshed out, so whenever he is on screen he seems more like the director's 'deus-ex machina' tool to serve as a barrier for Ahnold than as a separate and distinct character on his own. The idea that a Colombian narco-terrorist is bringing the war against drugs to the good ole' US of A is a decent starting point for a movie, but there needs to be some kind of extra level built on top to make the film a successful one. Collateral Damage just seemed to me like a house that had a solid foundation, but was completed with cardboard and boring personalities. The movie lacks in a key dramatic aspect of the action movie: the constant building of intrigue and intensity. There are definitely scenes where the director tries to build this necessary drama, but he fails time and time again to do anything of the sort. What results is a film that is severely wanting in story and utterly flounders when it comes to keeping the audience involved and on the edge of their collective seats. And isn't that what action movies are really for?

-Cote