Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a fearless firefighter ("All right, guys. Heads up. Let's do it") whose wife and son get blown up by a South American terrorist: code name, El Lobo. Conviction -- political, emotional, or otherwise -- is not something you need waste any time looking for. Calculation is everywhere. The brief glimpse of Happy Home Life -- the aging Schwarzenegger, now in his mid-fifties, soaping himself in the shower with his toddler son, looking for all the world as though he's advertising the latherability of Zest -- and the tender wave from a block away at the very moment the wife and child are blown to smithereens (the star is saved from having to act a reaction when he immediately gets bowled over by a taxicab) are tacked on at the outset only because the filmmaker, Andrew Davis of Chain Reaction, The Fugitive, Under Siege, Above the Law, can't trust to the viewers' imagination. How will they know how big a tragedy this is unless "Amazing Grace" is rendered on bagpipes at graveside? The dialogue traffics in similar rudiments: "You cannot take the law into you own hands," "You cannot negotiate with terrorists" (well, you can and you can't), etc. Schwarzenegger, who really is getting too old for this kind of thing, signals his implacability with a patented one-eyed squint -- this is why they pay him the big bucks -- as if sighting down a Winchester. And the true identity of El Lobo is a "surprise" only because -- or only if -- the spectator has become inured to, resigned to, the improbabilities in the plotting up to that point. (Sure: the collagen-lipped, supermodel-cheekboned peasant wife of the terrorist will switch sides once she gets to meet an American in person, once she sees his humanity up close. Why not?) It is no surprise from any angle that each of the chief villains will need to be killed twice: par for the course. With Elias Koteas, Francesca Neri, Cliff Curtis, John Turturro. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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