Review – Collateral Damage

Not since the conflux of The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island has Hollywood found such serendipity between real-life awfulness and tinsel town tragedy. In retrospect, it’s almost hard to believe that this movie was slated to come out just as the Sept. 11 attack took place and was yanked off the tracks due to the similarity of theme if not of detail. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a fireman whose wife and son are bystander casualties of a terrorist bombing. When the well-meaning but flummoxed FBI and the creepy CIA prove to be of little help, our hero takes matters into his own hands and ventures to Colombia to find El Lobo (yeah, no kidding), his family’s slayer. At a couple of points the story dips ever so briefly into an honest examination of the geopolitical economics of drug-related terrorism. But fear not, it always snaps back in short order to the far simpler world of Arnold versus the Forces of Evil. A couple of good action sequences are pretty much all this movie has going for it. See if desperate