"It's Arnie, therefore it is good" (Collateral Damage (DVD))

Member Name: spongass

Product:	Collateral Damage (DVD)
Date:	11/12/02 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none that I can remember therfore they can't have been that good

Disadvantages: Arnie, Unconvincing, Unmemorable

Arnold Schwarzenegger has never been my favourite actor, in fact I can safely say he has been good in only one role, Terminator, and in that he played a robot. With his wooden acting, lack of personality and basic grasp of English and accents, he was typecast as the psychotic robot but when it comes to playing a human being with emotions he fails utterly miserably, I don't fault him for his effort but he should realise that he cannot do it. I cite such terrible atrocities of film history as Total Recall and End of Days as evidence. As well as this he has been placed in a film that has an appallingly artificial plot and even the action for which Arnie is renowned is simply not that great on a scale that we have come to expect. The phrase "It's Arnie, therefore it is good" doesn't work on me any more.


I have been ranting on at Arnie for a bit and to be fair I have enjoyed films of his other than Terminator and T2, such as the classic Predator and True Lies although the reason I enjoy the latter is more because of the excellent script, screenplay and the idea of a Bond spoof that is more subtle than something like Naked Gun than because of Arnie's performance.

At no point during watching this film did I feel that I was enjoying myself and may well have walked out but seeing as I'd paid for it I was damn well going to sit and watch this pap in the hope that it improved.

It didn't!

Arnie, playing the part of Gordon Brewer, a devoted family man who is as hard as nails, is deeply wounded when his wife and son are killed accidentally in a terrorist explosion. He is appalled when government agencies seem to do nothing to bring the man responsible to justice and as such decides to take matters into his own hands in a one man war against Columbian drug smuggling and terrorism. He appears to be a very gullible man who, because he immediately falls in love again about five minutes after his wife's dea
th, almost causes another, even bigger terrorist incident.

The amount of screen time Arnie gets detracts from supporting actors and we don't see enough of them to form a proper opinion but from what I can see Elias Koteas and Francesca Neri put in fairly solid performances but also fairly unmemorable, a word that basically describes this whole film.

I would have expected more from the man who directed the classic The Fugitive but sadly Andrew Davis cannot save this film from a mediocre script, a dubious front man and contrived plot. This film is not worth watching, if you are looking for action films then you surely want explosions and guns which this film has but there are so many other films in this genre that are far superior.

Dicas

P.S. I have given this film two stars, not because it had anything much of merit, but because I have seen worse and am not keen on the trend that anything that is liked gets five stars and anything disliked automatically gets one.

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