Collide (2017)

Collide (2017)

IMDB Rating 5.7/10

An American backpacker gets involved with a ring of drug smugglers as their driver, though he winds up on the run from his employers across Cologne high-speed Autobahn.

Director: Eran Creevy

Writers: F. Scott Frazier (screenplay), Eran Creevy (screenplay) 

Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Felicity Jones, Anthony Hopkins

PG-13 | 1h 39min | Action, Thriller

IMDB link Here

Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones star in this car chase-driven thriller, which also features Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley as rival gangsters.      

 Where would distinguished Academy Award-winning actors be in their dotage years if not for B-movies? Fortunately, there are plenty of them to go around — B-movies, I mean — guaranteeing lucrative paychecks and international location travel for the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley, who compete in Collide to see which one can better chew the scenery.

Not that they’re the stars of this low-rent thriller directed by Eran Creevy. That dubious distinction belongs to British thespians Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones, here both playing Americans. That Jones’ star has so recently risen with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story might account for the current release of this long-delayed entry, which opened without being screened for critics.

Director Creevy (Welcome to the Punch) and co-screenwriter F. Scott Frazier attempt to infuse the proceedings with amusing, campy touches, such as Geran constantly referring to Casey as “Burt Reynolds,” at one point rhapsodizing about Reynold’s fit body in Deliverance. Hopkins is also given drolly amusing dialogue, which the actor delivers with his trademark vocal flair. But the dark humor feels forced and artificial, especially when tied to the utterly ludicrous plot machinations in which Casey evades capture at every turn, whether from the most inept torturer in movie history or endless policemen who somehow fail to guard the back door of the bar they’ve surrounded.

The vehicular mayhem is generally well-staged, and the film moves along at a brisk pace during its fat-free, 99-minute running time. But Hoult and Jones are unable to breathe much life into their bland characters, and it’s ultimately sad to watch the former Hannibal Lecter and Gandhi reduced to playing silly, tough-guy caricatures.

Read full review at Holly wood reporter

Collide' Is Neither Fast Nor Furious  

You might wonder why, exactly, there has been almost no promotion for it, especially since it seems to be cribbing the Fast and Furious formula audiences seem to like so much. It's complicated, but basically the movie ended up being a pawn in a larger game. When original distributor Relativity Media went bankrupt, the film - lensed in Germany in 2014 under the original title of Autobahn - was sold back to funder IM Global for a pittance of around $200,000, with Open Road Films to distribute and provide Relativity with audit statements. Under the circumstances, a long theatrical window could thereby become a headache, as opposed to simply leveraging the deals Open Road already has with Showtime.

Collide's production costs above and beyond German tax credits are estimated at $21.5 million, but IM Global doesn't need to make nearly that much. It has already made $2.5 million internationally, which more than covers the fire-sale price at which they bought it back; the skimpy receipts it's likely to make domestically are a shrug at this point. Yeah, they could have promoted it (somewhat misleadingly) as a new heist movie starring Jyn Erso from Star Wars, but it's pretty clearly being released out of obligation, with no further investment required.

And I wish I could say that's a shame, but if you skip it, you're not missing much. Wait for some diligent YouTuber to edit together Hopkins' best moments, and you'll enjoy the best five minutes of the film for free.

Considering director Eran Creevy (Welcome to the Punch) is English, it seems odd that he'd hire British actors Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones only to force them into mediocre American accents that come and go like karma chameleons. Yes, it's arguably an even odder choice to have Ben Kingsley play a Turkish character, adopting a thick "generic foreign" accent that lapses into Cockney every time he stops giving a hoot, but at least that's a choice that goes big rather than going home. Kingsley puts a lot of effort into giving a delightfully terrible performance that's probably hideously offensive to actual Turks (I won't presume to speak for them), but it's a lot more watchable than Hoult and Jones trying to be the most generic of Americans who've moved to Germany but don't seem to fit in or even understand the language.

Read full review at Forbes