“Collide”

LOUISA:

LOUISA SAYS:

I want to slap the person who decided Felicity Jones should be a movie star. She is, without question, one of the most annoying and overrated actors working today. And once again she is miscast as a bleached-blonde American love interest in “Collide,” a movie that I guarantee you’ve never heard of and one that you could watch and not remember having seen a month later. It’s not wholly awful, it’s far from unwatchable, but it’s completely forgettable.

This amounts to little more than a low rent action movie with a repetitive, unoriginal plot. You’ll get plenty of deja vu that you’ve seen this movie before — and you’ve most definitely seen a better version of the same film before. It’s a classic heist story with zero originality or spunk. Casey (Nicholas Hoult) gets involved with some very bad people after he robs a truck belonging to a drug trafficker and mob boss (Anthony Hopkins). When his girlfriend Juliette (Jones) is threatened and in danger, he calls on his former drug smuggling boss (Ben Kingsley) for help protecting her. Yawn.

The film is an obvious wannabe homage to the classic movie “True Romance,” with more than a few borrowed ideas and lines. It comes across as a cheap imitator at times (Jones wears a blonde Alabama -style wig, there are certain scenes framed in the exact same style, and there’s even some similar dialogue). This movie serves as a pertinent reminder to never copy a true cinematic original (or risk the fallout of an unfavorable comparison).

As a car enthusiast, I wanted to enjoy many of the car chase scenes but because of the way the action pieces were choppily edited, I couldn’t tell what the heck was going on. When you have gorgeous, sleek cars speed racing through the German Autobahn with fantastic and skilled stunt driving, slow the camera down so I can enjoy and appreciate the action. This is just one of the many failures of this poorly directed film.

Another major distraction is the bizarre, head-scratching, cartoonish performance from Kinglsey and the unusually hammy turn from Hopkins (both not exactly miscast as two unlikely rival gangsters, but both over the top in their portrayals). Jones displays the worst American accent you have ever heard in your life (but it’s important to the plot that her character is American and not British). Hoult is as bland as ever, and their whirlwind romance so unbelievable that you’ll question the main character’s motivation in the first place.

The first 30 minutes of “Collide” are so bad, with the director (Eran Creevy) trying so desperately to make an “artsy” style film, that it’s painful to sit through (I actually contemplated walking out). I’m glad I decided to stay because while the film isn’t memorable, it’s not really that terrible. It is, however, a textbook example of a junk movie that studios choose to dump into theaters to fill the dead zone of February.