Collateral Damage (2002)
Collateral Damage is a 2002 American vigilante action-thriller film directed by Andrew Davis and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elias Koteas, Francesca Neri, Cliff Curtis, John Leguizamo, and John Turturro. The film tells the story of Los Angeles firefighter Gordon Brewer (Schwarzenegger), who seeks to avenge his son’s and wife’s deaths at the hands of a guerrilla commando, by traveling to Colombia and facing his family’s killers. Collateral Damage was released in the United States on February 8, 2002, to negative reviews, and was a commercial failure.
Plot:
A bomb detonates in the plaza of the Colombian Consulate building in Los Angeles, killing nine people, including a caravan of Colombian officials and American intelligence agents. Among the civilians killed are the wife and son of an LAFD firefighter, Captain Gordon “Gordy” Brewer, who was injured in the explosion. A tape is sent to the U.S. State Department, in which a masked man calling himself “El Lobo” (The Wolf) claims responsibility, justifying it as retaliation for the oppression of Colombia by the United States. The FBI believes El Lobo is a Colombian terrorist named Claudio Perrini.
CIA Officer Peter Brandt, the Colombia Station Chief, is harshly reprimanded for the incident by a Senate Oversight Committee, which promptly terminates all CIA operations in Colombia. Brandt angrily returns to Mompós and meets with his paramilitary allies to plan a major offensive to take down Claudio.
Frustrated at the political red tape regarding the investigation, Brewer travels to Mompós to personally hunt down Claudio but is quickly arrested for illegal entry. The guerrillas stage a prison uprising to free their comrades and abduct Brewer to demand a large ransom for him.
