COLLIDE: Did They Even Try To Make It Good?

Collide is one of those movies where you watch the trailer and you go huh. I’ve probably seen the whole movie, more or less. And then you actually go see the movie, and it turns out you were right. Which doesn’t say much about Collide.

What did Collide do right?

This is going to be a short section.

Collide is at least visually appealing in a few spots. Car chases in tightly packed European cities are overdone, sure, but they are done so often because they’re admittedly fun to watch. Same deal with warehouses full of luxury cars, insane car crashes than no human could possibly live through, and Ben Kingsley playing an eccentrically angry drug dealer with a bus full of hookers. Like I said, kind of fun to watch (I’m a simple man).

As for the actual plot, it was just one notch more complex than your usual soulless action movie. There were a few twists and turns that added a little bit of intricacy into the story, though they unfortunately didn’t add any charm or substance.

There was also something really minor that caught my eye: some creatively capitalized subtitles. Why don’t more movies have fun with subtitles more often? It’s always just some white or yellow plain text on the bottom of the screen; why don’t they make it really evil looking or make emphasized words show up way bigger than the others? It would be such an easy way to breathe some semblance of stylization into vanilla movies like this one.

And those are pretty much the only good things I can think of. To their credit, I guess they did manage to cast both Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley, so that’s something. OK, now we’ve covered everything good about Collide.

What did Collide do wrong?

“Romeo and Juliet, ever heard of it? It’s a tragedy where many characters died brutal deaths, including the titular Juliet. You may be thinking that I brought that up because of some really deep and thought-provoking parallels to our current situation, but no – it’s actually just because your girlfriend’s name is Juliette.”

So I may have embellished a bit, but that’s a disturbingly accurate representation of an actual piece of dialogue in Collide – which is unfortunately an accurate representation of the entire script. And when the dialogue isn’t comedically clumsy, it’s mind-numbingly boring (to be fair, some of this blandness is saved by Hopkins, who admirably surges on with some truly Nicolas Cage-worthy emphasis choices).

Plot-wise, Collide falls into basically all the clichés that mediocre action movies are known for, resulting in a plot that falls apart if you think about it for juuuuuust a second. Why did Hagen (Hopkins) leave just one of his bad guys to torture Casey (Nicholas Hoult) when he had like five standing right next to him during his whole evil speech? Why did Casey put Juliette (Felicity Jones) at risk by refusing to sell out Geran (Kingsley), who he definitely thought was a scumbag just a few scenes before? Why would police try to capture two drug lords by forming a semicircle around them, leaving an entire half-circle area open for escape?

But I digress. Because even if the plot had been totally airtight and the dialogue had been outstanding, it still wouldn’t have been a good movie; they never made us care about the characters at all! Think about it like this: the plot involved our protagonist doing a lot of risky things to pay for a conveniently priced surgery for this girl that he allegedly really loves. If the audience both believes in and cares about our protagonists’ relationship, then they’d really care about the main character and these risky things he’s doing (movies like True Romance pull this off effectively).

But Collide essentially skips the part where they make you care about Casey and Juliette’s relationship. They literally reduced their falling in love to a thirty second music montage! This is such an egregiously bad storytelling choice, especially because it would have been so easy to avoid. Cutting some of their several forgettable action scenes in favor of fifteen minutes of character and relationship development would have done wonders for the story, but instead we got to watch a few more car flips and people punching each other.

About those forgettable action scenes: if you’re going to make a movie where you sacrifice all character development to fit in more and more fighting and chasing, you should at least be offering something sort of new and unique in that area. In other words, if you’re going all in on being an action movie (at the expense of all other story elements), the action scenes better be pretty good. But as you might have guessed… they’re not.

Collide piles run-of-the-mill fight scenes on top of run-of-the-mill chase scenes. When they got to the horse track, I at least thought they were teasing a horseback chase scene. Which would have been great! I’m willing to buy basically any premise that will lead to an especially unique action or chase scene – it automatically excuses any contrivance that precedes it (AKA the Fast and Furious rule). Instead, we got yet another unimaginative hand-to-hand combat scene. Just what I wanted.

Conclusion

Collide layers uninspired dialogue on top of a poorly thought-out plot, resulting in a forgettable disappointment of a movie. If they had invested just a little bit of effort into actually developing their protagonists, its reception might have been a little different. But as it stands now, Collide isn’t just boring; it’s outright bad.

But that’s enough from me – what did you think of Collide? Let us know in the comments!

Collide opened on February 24 in the US and the UK.