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COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but who knows what audience will warm to the reheated stew of Andrew Davis’s Collateral Damage. Postponed from its scheduled October 5 release following the World Trade Center attack, the film is so muddled in motive and narrative that it isn’t even coherent, let alone exploitative. LA Fire Department captain Gordon Brewer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sees his wife and boy blown away by a bomb set by Colombian terrorist/druglord Claudio "The Wolf" Perrini (Mohammed Atta look-alike Cliff Curtis) that was meant for CIA spook Peter Brandt (Elias Koteas). Since a treaty between Perrini’s rebel group and the government is in the works, Brewer realizes nothing will be done to bring the killer to justice. So he heads to Colombia (too bad that country didn’t make it into "the axis of evil") to get the job done himself. But this is not the usual Schwarzenegger action fest: he uses no guns (though a fireman’s ax proves handy), he has no quotable tag lines, and he’s torn to discover that the bad guy has a wife and kid too. Add to that an ambivalent portrait of the CIA (including a helicopter wipeout of a terrorist compound à la Apocalypse Now) and you have Davis’s version of ambiguity. That’s not Arnold’s forte, though, and Collateral Damage proves a casualty not so much of history as of fuzzy moral vision.
BY PETER KEOUGH
Issue Date: February 7 - 14, 2002
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