Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in "Collateral Damage," Warner Brothers' new attempt at a quality bang-em-up action flick. The film opened Friday.

The fact that the makers of "Collateral Damage" consider it a movie with a message is insulting but funny. There's no need to note the lowness of expectations for a "conceptual" collaboration between Arnold Schwarzenegger and the director of next year's "Under Siege 3," written by the guy who edited "The Next Karate Kid."

Yeah, exactly.

What people really want to know is why 'Collateral Damage' was pulled from distribution following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Answer? Because it's about a terrorist bomb killing some people and there's a firefighter in it, and we can't be trusted to make the distinction between the experience of losing thousands of people to an uncannily violent disaster and watching a mediocre actor pretend to get his family blown up on a big projection screen.

But Arnie is that firefighter. Those people were his family.

And get this: Arnie cries. Yeah, wow, Arnie cries. He looks pretty messed up doing it, too, pretty convincing.

Two weeks later, Gordy (that's Arnie's pretend name in this one) starts taping aerial photos of Colombia - the native country of his family's killer - to the wall behind his desk at home. He starts glaring at walls. He pesters the CIA, miffed to the core that they haven't murdered the terrorist yet.

About four minutes later, Gordy is hiking through the Colombian jungle with his little backpack. He kills like six people on the way to the terrorist camp, then he builds a bomb. He learned that in firefighter school, bomb-building. He puts the bomb outside the terrorist's house. The terrorist doesn't die.

What's the point of describing the rest of the movie?

But there's a lot to consider besides the quality of the movie, such as what does it mean that a movie like this is coming out at, what pundits have been calling for months now, "a time like this"?

"Collateral damage" is a term we've been throwing around a lot lately. In the movie, one of the legal defenders of the terrorist uses it to describe Gordy's family. Gordy then goes berserk and wrecks the guy's office. Americans can't be collateral damage, silly! The term usually means expendable civilian casualties.

And what about the terrorist? "El Lobo" repeats over and over that he's fighting for the independence of his people, a passion that arose when his own daughter was killed by American-led Colombian troops in a village massacre. But we, and the filmmakers, seem to ignore that. We cheer for Gordy - he's on our side. Hey, he lost his family.

Supposedly this movie is about how violence begets violence. In a country where a lot of people are sporting American flags with "Fear This" written on them, you have to wonder if any of them will stand up and clap at the end.

But Gordy does murder his family's killers. Then he rides off into the sunset in a black FBI Suburban. What's the message again?

Anyone who actually pays to see this movie is probably either 13 or really bored. Even if the filmmakers had any kind of serious message, an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick is not the place to put it. Still, stuff blows up and the bad guys die a gruesome death. That makes it, more or less, just another Arnie movie.

And that's OK. Most people go to the movies to escape, not to get help figuring out how they feel about things. What they should ask themselves is, "Do I go anywhere to figure out how I feel about things?"