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© DSFC |
COLLATERAL
DAMAGE
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| DAMAGED GOODS | ||||||||||||
| by
pat Man, oh man, what a not good movie.It was delayed because of the similarity of events to the September 11th attack, which apparently I didn't read up on enough, because I didn't know that one of the firemen involved had actually gone and taken out Bin Laden himself. While delayed for several months, they apparently did not go back and reshoot things, because a memo came from up on high that they had a hit on their hand. I think the "S" was broken on the typewriter. That, or they realized what would be needed in reshoots to fix the movie, and decided it wasn't worth it. Practically everything is bad, usually in that way where you look at it and thought "with a little work, or if they'd done his, that might have been cool." It just seemed like nobody cared. The direction was some of the laziest I've seen. Quite literally, I think they had the script, said, "Okay, we need a shot of the kid, now we need an explosion, have we gotten them waving hello?" The director, Andrew Davis, probably never looked up to see what was being shot how, just calling things out. It was all coverage, no style, no thought. The editing reflected this, trying to squeeze important tidbits into some rhythm, poorly. The effects are pretty weak, too. There's a badly composited sequence of Arnie in a river, bobbing up and down in a way people don't bob in rivers, the edges are fuzzy, the colors are off, and it is a reality breaking effect overall. It also raises the question: Why bother with the effect? They shot the river, Arnie was in that area for other shots, they had to build a tank and get him wet for his part of the composite, and essentially spent a lot of money to not get him in the river while they were there. This is why we get lousy $100 million movies. That shot could have funded a decent indie film by a fresh, passionate director, but instead it got laughs and groans. The dialogue was horrid. The whole script was full of the standard clichés, not even adapted to concept, just thrown in here and there, but first we look at the dialogue. Schwarzenegger's dialogue could make a decent industrial techno song, if given some white noise and a deep bass beat. "You killed my wife and son, you killed my wife and son, you killed my wife and son, I'm not like you!" Get the groove on! "You killed my wife and son, you killed my wife and son, you killed my wife and son, I'm not like you!" Feelin' a funky revenge comin' on! The terrorist hates us because we "hide behind our family values, and have no place in Colombia." I question his fluency in understanding English. How is helping to prevent an uprising, or whatever our world police force was doing, hiding behind family values? Are we preventing their people from watching sitcoms about single mothers? Is that our obtrusive family values? Are we destroying their drug cartels by explaining to their soldiers that "Users are Losers?" This kind hack-line logic runs rampant throughout. One almost good point is made by the baddie: "We fight for freedom. Do only you Americans have the right to freedom?" Of course, this broad statement on the rights of all citizens of the world to fight for what they believe despite who the US supports in office is refuted by Arnie, who asks: "You mean the right to kill my wife and son?" Yes, actually. First on their list was the right to kill wives and children. Then housing, schooling, and medicine. Then, of course, a cheap long-distance alternative. The story. Hooboy. I guess you know now, they killed his wife and son. A bomb on a motorcycle was placed in front of a building, the windows were blown in, blowing out the side windows, killing his wife and son. Luckily, Arnie was only ten feet from the motorcycle, but far from exploding windows, and walked away from the incident with only minor injuries from being hit by a car immediately thereafter. Why? Dunno. Extra stunt guy on set that day, I guess. He vows revenge, the government says no, he goes anyway. He's a firefighter, by the way. We discover this in what apparently is a dream sequence. Arnie jumps over a huge flaming pit to get to a screaming woman. Does he save her? Does she die? How does he get her back over that pit? We don't find out, because suddenly his wife wakes up from that awful nightmare! Whew! Back to later. One of his fireman friends knows a guy who is an expert on random things about Columbia. He looks over the research Arnie has done, and says, "Oh, you already know [plot points A,B, and C]" and ultimately the only advice is, when he gets there, he should probably take the bus. I'm not kidding. After he takes the bus, they hit a roadblock, he gets chased into a river, we get some lousy effects, then he washes ashore somewhere. At this point, he communicates with his friend telepathically. There is no phone call, he's off course from where he was supposed to be, and an Arnie voice over asks the guy what to do, and he answers. Telepathy was the only thing I could think of. I won't bother with the rest of the plot, because it continues along just as moronically, from coincidence to coincidence, with the occasional "twist" seen plenty of times before in similar movies. One other major gripe, though, is before he returns to the US, he battles with an American soldier raiding the camp. This is part of a rescue operation involving flying in and blowing up every building. How they knew he wasn't in one is beyond me, but I know we have good intelligence gathering, apparently. Anyway, he fights and kills the guy. Repeat: Arnold kills an American soldier. Nothing is done about it. He is not arrested, reprimanded, scolded, or even tsk-tsked for doing this.Yay, patriotism! This makes me proud to be an American, because as an American, I can make a movie for the cost of one of the senseless explosions glossed over in a random shot in this film. If I was Canadian, I could have made two. |
 ARNOLD IS A CUT-UP  DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY ROBISON  LEGUIZAMO IS REMINDED OF 'THE PEST'  DIRECTOR DAVIS DOESN'T CARE  FAKE ID'S AREN'T VERY GOOD IN COLUMBIA  DUCKLIPS HOOLIHAN |
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