IN 'COLLATERAL DAMAGE,' ARNOLD STARTS AS FIREMAN, ENDS UP AS TERMINATOR

"Collateral Damage" stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Los Angeles
firefighter with an ax to grind. Being Arnold, he grinds it so relentlessly
that the ax becomes a cutting-edge weapon in its own right. This ludicrous
revenge fantasy, which is triggered by a fictional incident of urban
terrorism, was originally scheduled to open last fall, but its debut was
delayed after the events of Sept. 11. While the world would not be a poorer
place if it had never been released, the movie's unearned significance
makes it hard to ignore, though impossible to enjoy with a whole heart or
an unrattled mind.

Arnold as a firefighter! Could any occupation seem more genuinely heroic at
the moment, or be more opportune for a rusting iron man who has been trying
in recent films to semihumanize himself? Yet he fights a conventional fire
in a burning building only once, during a title sequence that establishes
the bravery of his character, Gordy Brewer, and also shows, in
action-thriller shorthand, that Gordy loves his wife and child, a sweet
little boy with a lisp. Mr. Schwarzenegger takes up his real role, an
avenger/terminator fighting international terrorists at home and abroad,
shortly after a bomb intended for Colombian diplomats -- that's right,
Colombian -- destroys a public plaza in downtown Los Angeles and kills his
wife and son.

Before Sept. 11, "Collateral Damage" might have been seen, and indulged, as
one of those big-budget exploitation flicks that grabs off current events
and geographic regions with a cheerfully modular approach to plotting:
Latin America as a stand-in for the Middle East, drug lords as substitutes
for arms merchants and anti-American Colombian fanatics as surrogates for
Muslims. (The production manages to have it every which way, thanks in no
small part to the casting of Cliff Curtis as El Lobo, the Colombian
mastermind behind the terrorist plot. This excellent actor with dark,
brooding eyes is a New Zealander, but he could easily be taken for a Middle
Easterner; indeed, he played one prominently in "Three Kings." And it
manages to be as insulting to Colombians as some previous terrorist
thrillers were to Arabs.)

Five months after Sept. 11, the movie inevitably echoes those events, but
in a loud and extremely cheesy way. The question is not whether audiences
are ready for copious new helpings of cinematic violence -- the box-office
success of "Black Hawk Down" has answered that -- but whether they're ready
to see a story with ostensible, if accidental, real-world relevance loosely
coupled to Arnold's customary antics. (In olden days it was the G-men who
always got their man. Now it's this fireman who goes after El Lobo and gets
the terrorist the CIA couldn't find.)

The director, Andrew Davis ("The Fugitive"), has played the crummy hand his
writers dealt him with more style than the material deserves. I must
confess that it's dumb fun, up to a point, to watch the big guy breaking
out of a Colombian prison; plunging down rapids; heaving up out of white
water like some ancient monster; blowing up a cocaine factory; surviving a
belated, Vietnam-style CIA raid on a guerrilla camp; and then chasing back
home to protect our nation's capital from another terrorist attack. But a
lot of Arnold no longer goes a long way, especially in the present
circumstances. After the World Trade Center towers fell, many people said
that the spectacle resembled a Hollywood movie. "Collateral Damage"
resembles nothing quite so much as its perfervid self.