‘Collateral damage’ kills audience Fans should wait for ‘Terminator 3’ for better fit between movie, actor

In theaters

Collateral Damage. Directed by Andrew Davis. Written by David Griffiths and Peter Griffiths. 110 minutes. Rated R.

There’s nothing quite like the intrusion of real life to showcase just how stupid some hopeful Hollywood blockbusters really are.

Take Andrew Davis’ “Collateral Damage” for instance.

Before the events of Sept. 11, the film would have served only as a reminder of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s waning influence in movies. It would have stood as his third flop in a row, suggesting that the actor had become, like so many other ’80s relics, a man unable to connect with a public that once adored him.

But since Sept. 11, a series of events surrounding the film’s release have demanded that certain parallels be drawn between the movie and the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Indeed, after the film’s original October release date was delayed by Warner Bros. Studios – which, by the way, came away with millions in free advertising when they shrewdly yanked the movie from theaters – the studio itself not only acknowledged the comparisons, but courted them.

So be it.

Like so many of Schwarzenegger’s rough-and-tumble movies, “Collateral Damage” is a cartoon action fantasy that pits one man against a world fraught with evil. It has nothing to do with real life -which is fine, as any fan of Schwarzenegger’s best movies can attest.

The problem is that this particular dog isn’t one of Schwarzenegger’s best. It’s a poorly directed, cliche-ridden disaster, one whose glaring improbabilities, silly situations and implausible action sequences seem more ludicrous than ever given the tough education in terrorism Americans have received in the long months following the attacks on our country.

Real life, one could say, has rendered “Collateral Damage” obsolete. But the bigger problem facing Hollywood is this: Just as Cold War thrillers fizzled when the Cold War ended, future thrillers featuring terrorists terrorizing Americans will either have to rise to the occasion and take the subject seriously -or face the same fate.

As “Collateral Damage” opens, dozens of Los Angeles firemen are scrambling into a burning building as its victims rush to escape. Schwarzenegger’s Gordy Brewer is one of those men, but just as he moves to save an elderly woman from certain death, the scene cuts to Brewer’s wife, Anne (Lindsay Frost), suddenly waking to find Gordy playing with their son in their living room.

The burning building and Gordy’s brave rescue, it would seem, was little more than a bad dream.

For audiences, the real nightmare begins later, when Gordy witnesses his wife and son being blown to bits by a terrorist’s bomb. It’s an effective scene, one that can’t be viewed without recalling the balloons of smoke and fire pouring from the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon. But since this is essentially a Schwarzenegger movie, with all that implies, Davis undermines the rest of the movie with a string of unlikely scenarios featuring his pumped-up hero.

Furious that the CIA isn’t doing enough to catch the terrorist who murdered his family, Gordy sets out to bring the man, identified as a swarthy, American-hating Colombian named El Lobo (Cliff Curtis), to justice on his own.

Predictably, it’s a journey peppered with peril and danger, but surprisingly little suspense or tension. As Gordy leaves the states to travel deep into the jungles of Colombia, where he knows El Lobo is hiding, he infiltrates a cocaine cartel, blows it up, is sent to a Colombian prison, blows it up, and eventually finds his man, whom he nearly blows up – all without speaking a word of Spanish.

And just wait until he outruns that fireball.

John Turturro and John Leguizamo make superfluous appearances as a Canadian sexaholic and a wise-cracking Colombian drug lord, respectively, but where Gordy really gets into trouble is when he meets Selena (Francesca Neri) and her young son, two painfully obvious reminders of his own lost family who become key to the film’s one genuine surprise.

As an actor, Schwarzenegger still has the emotional range of a tube steak, which will serve him well in the upcoming “Terminator 3,” for which he’s being paid $30 million to play a defunct robot programmed without emotions.

But in a movie whose subject demands he showcase a range of emotions more complex than pain and rage, Schwarzenegger proves he’s not our Everyman – or what this clumsy movie needs.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Tuesdays on “News Center at 5” and Thursdays at “News

Center at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.