In the few blocks distance, I thought about how Andy Davis' new movie wasn't very good, but how its intentions, both politically and melodramatically, were honorable. Davis is one of the great, unpretentious craftsmen of action filmmaking: There are moments in "The Fugitive" and "Above the Law" that are about as smart and unflashy as you can get. He's often saddled with bad scripts, or perhaps scripts whose smarter content gets pared away in the editing room.

I went into the photo exhibit. One thousand five hundred photos by amateur and professional photographers. A sea of witness. But in one corner, there was a videotape playing on a monitor. Someone set up a video camera on their roof in Brooklyn and let it run, for the almost hour-and-a-half from the time the World Trade Center was hit by the first plane to the time both towers fell into the earth. I stared. My eyes stung. It took me hours before I could remember I'd spent the morning at an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

There was a lot of minty-fresh talk about how Hollywood would or might or could or should change after the events of the fall. "Collateral Damage" places Schwarzenegger at the center of a second-rate rehash of world events as a revenge-bent Los Angeles fireman who hopes to avenge the death of his wife and child after their murder in an attack by Colombian terrorists. There was ill-informed talk about the movie never being shown, as if it were some sort of prescient snuff film that would too accurately track the tragic events in New York in Washington. Of course, that was foolish: Major movies are distributed by international conglomerates, and it would be the height of fiduciary irresponsibility to chuck away $60-100 million dollars of stockholder equity. (It's even illegal.)

So now, come cold February, we get Arnold. The novelist Andrew Klavan wrote a piece for the New York Times op-ed page after the temporary shelving of "Collateral Damage," and he offered the opinion that he would liked to have seen the movie that weekend—an idealized fantasy of how a single citizen could go out and kick terrorist ass, how it could perhaps be cathartic. (The flashy, gritty "Training Day" took the dollars of those who wanted such stories way back in October.) Others ventured at what offense "Collateral Damage" might hold in its unintended parallels with events truer in emotional affect than all but the greatest artists can create.

Yet the script by brothers David and Peter Griffiths has the most thematic integrity of any Hollywood picture in months, with the simple and too-true demonstration best put by the poet W. H. Auden: "I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return." The only viewers who might be offended by "Collateral Damage" are those who are offended by mediocrity. Arnold treks to the jungles of Colombia, goes through a series of incredible coincidences, evades an incredible series of munitions lobbed toward his huge head, meets an unlikely series of character actors—including John Turturro as a randy Canadian, and eventually saves the day after a neck-wrenching series of plot twists.

It's sad, actually. Davis is also one of the last great practitioners of spatial integrity: While it's disguised as a fictional location, the site of the bombing that kills Schwarzenegger's family, shot in Los Angeles' Century City, does not fabricate the impression of a place through a series of haphazard shots. If you know the location, you can actually see how he placed the camera to take advantage of what exists, observing scrupulously as classical directors like Anthony Mann ("Winchester 73," "Raw Deal"). In a movie like "The Fugitive," or a long, intricate chase through the Chicago Loop streets and alleyways in the Chuck Norris vehicle, "Code of Silence," or how Chicago is made to resemble a dozen cities in "The Package," Davis genuinely sees how the human form, vehicles and the motion picture camera can move through space.

But then, what if the script stinks to high heaven? You get "Collateral Damage." You catch a few minutes on cable late some night, you watch five minutes, say, "That's not so bad," then click back to Sportscenter.

Also by Ray Pride

UNSEASONED
The last time I flew into New York, the 767 rode low over the lights of Manhattan, as if tugged gently along the beaded arterial glow of Broadway. It's a sooty dusk this December day, not from smoke, but from fog and shattered light. It is as if this spectacle were composed of albumen and platinum and memory, like a Stieglitz print on a clean, well-lighted gallery's wall.
(2002-01-31)

A THOUSAND WORDS
December in SoHo: two storefronts, a former agnes b. for women store, are no longer neat with fashion, but swollen with sorrow and torrents of imagery, hanging from walls and wires, with clusters of New Yorkers comparing their own memories (or evidence) of those moments on September 11 and afterward.
(2002-01-31)

SLUSH LIFE
Halfway through the twentieth edition of the Sundance Film Festival, instead of buzz, the sound was more like a cool hum. That is, except for the newly anointed filmmakers whose wet-from-the-lab work was bought up in the becalmed non-frenzy of acquisitions.
(2002-01-24)

SCARY MOVIE
My prediction? The "The Mothman Prophecies" will be big. Mark Pellington's third feature is a lovely, tense, distinctively stylized and remarkably frightening nail-biter about inexplicable psychic phenomena overpowering a small West Virginia town.
(2002-01-24)

FIRE FROM ABOVE
(2002-01-17)

LISTING CRAFT
(2002-01-10)

FICTION REVIEW
(2002-01-10)

VALET SPARKING
(2002-01-03)

GOOD GRIEF
(2002-01-03)

MANNERISM
(2001-12-27)

LOVED-IN SPACES
(2001-12-20)

MINDFUCK
(2001-12-13)