Collide - D

​Quick Hit: Hammy performances from big stars can’t save this dribble. 

Quick note before I begin the review - this German poster is so much cooler than the above American poster. 

As I watched Collide, I couldn’t help but think that I was watching a warm-up in 2017 for Baby Driver, or at least a spin-off of the Fast and the Furious franchise with the least interesting characters ever. The plot is so overwhelmingly familiar there is really no reason repeating it, but essentially Casey (Nicholas Holt from the X-Men First Class series) has to take one more job in order to raise money to help Juliette. He then runs afoul of bad people. The End.

Really, I wish I could leave my review at that, because my momma always tole me, “If you can’t say nothin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.” Well… sorry Momma. 

This movie is fairly awful in stretches. It’s almost like two different scripts were sent out – one to the older stars (Ben Kingsley and Anthony Hopkins) and one to the younger stars (Hoult and Felicity Jones). The first script is a hammy, gleeful B-movie that features actors gone wild, with huge action sets and scenes. The second is the movie that ultimately we received, a “Paint-By-Numbers” action film whose conclusion and scenes are undercooked and underwhelming. Hoult and Jones did nothing special in their roles, with only the occasional throwaway line that seems refreshing (and even that’s a stretch).
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Hopkins, and particularly Kingsley, however, take the opportunity and run with it. Hopkins seems to be taking every opportunity to play these roles lately, with another example being the last Transformers film. Kingsley, who plays a character who seems to have sprung from the ashes of his character in Iron Man 3 – the forgotten Mandarin – is so high he is consistently almost killing the other mains. It’s a dim bright spot, but it shines out of the mediocrity that is the rest of the film. 

Other than those performances, the film is awash in nothingness. The soundtrack sounds generally just meh. The action scenes never get above what you see on your daily commute. There’s one scene that almost is fun to watch, and then they decide to just crash the car. It’s not even an exciting crash, and Hoult somehow has no problems surviving a roll over. Now I’m all for suspending disbelief in action movies, and believing that our hero can survive the greatest of injuries. But you have to build up a certain tolerance to that, and Casey is too vanilla to have built that. Put Jason Statham in the role and make this Crank 4: Supercharged or something.

I’m going to give this one a “D”.
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For more on this film, check out IMDB.