Eran Creevy’s Collide is a junky, mostly forgettable little action picture. It does nothing new, nor does it want to and it’s not a film I can really recommend spending money on for those reasons. But on its own, it’s still surprisingly entertaining and completely watchable, a movie completely shorn of pretension and fully aware that it’s a run-of-the-mill action flick — with all the levity that entails and demands. Collide is like the frozen french fries of movies: you don’t want to make a diet of it, but if you’re in the right mood, it can hit the spot.
The plot is nothing special, following Casey (Nicholas Hoult, X-Men: Apocalypse), a young American with a rap sheet who’s drifting through Germany, making a living selling drugs for an eccentric Turk named Geran (Ben Kingsley). That is, of course, until he falls in love with Juliette (Felicity Jones), a fellow American who asks him to choose between her or his job. Choosing her, the two have one of those cinematic whirlwind romances, until he finds out that Juliette’s got a failing kidney. In order to get the money for a kidney transplant, Casey takes one last job from Geran — stealing a semitruck full of cocaine from ruthless drug kingpin Hagen (Anthony Hopkins).
Of course, this being a movie, things go awry and Casey must run from Hagen’s various henchman and make it to Juliette before anything worse happens. This leads to a lot of bad guys with terrible aim when it comes to shooting a pistol and a ton of car chases. The action is both the film’s selling point and its strongest asset. Again, we’re not reinventing the action picture here, but everything is coherent and thankfully done with practical effects and stuntmen. Choppy editing is kept to a minimum, meaning all that sound and fury onscreen can actually be followed and Collide, in the bargain, never gets very dull.
On top of all this, Collide also has one of those surprisingly good British casts, reminding everyone that Brit actors will be in just about anything. While this often leads to embarrassment (just keep Kingsley in Thunderbirds (2004) or Kingsley in BloodRayne (2005) in mind), the film is solidly enough built that this strange cast of actors helps out immensely. The dialogue is smart enough on its own, but the film gives Kingsley and Hopkins room to chew scenery. Yes, it’s flamboyant and cheesy, but it’s just enough to keep the film from feeling totally stale. Going into the movie, my biggest question was the notion of Hoult carrying a film — specifically an action film — but he’s got good chemistry with Jones and is made for this baby-faced, doe-eyed romantic the movie calls for him to play. It all lifts the film up to a level it has little business obtaining, something welcome in the ugliness that can be February moviegoing. Rated PG-13 for violence, frenetic action, some sexuality, language, and drug material.
Now Playing at Carmike 1o, Carolina Cinemark Asheville, Epic of Hendersonville, Regal Biltmore Grande.
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