"Collide" Blu-ray Review

I needed a second title in order to get the 2/$5 deal at Family Video and with zero desire to own Assassin's Creed or several other lame flicks and my buddy not wanting anything, I decided to get Collide based off the Blu-ray.com review which said it wasn't original, but it was well done. The alternative was to spend an extra 50 cents and just buy the other title alone.

Thinking now I should've spent the 50 cents and saved the other $2 and 100 minutes of time.

Slick-looking with some impressive car crashes, Collide is a forgettable trifle about a pair of ex-pat Americans played by Nicholas Hoult and Felicity Jones (because there were no American actors available it appears) in Cologne, Germany. He left behind one-too-many stolen cars in America and we never really know why she's there. He's been driving for Ben Kingsley's drug trafficker - something she appears familiar with already - and she won't date that kind of guy, so he quits the life in order to get all up in her business and we're treated to a montage of them being pretty and in love. And they lived happily ever af....[record scratch SFX]

Nope! She's got failing kidneys that she neglected to mention to him during all the kissy times and as a foreigner of unspecified "status" in Germany, ineligible for that sweet socialized medicine or something. In order to get the cash needed to pay for her transplant, Hoult returns to Kingsley's service to execute a heist of a truck full of either money or drugs (they never made clear which phase of the operation they were hitting) being run by Kingsley's master, the outwardly-appearing totally legit Anthony Hopkins. Of course everything goes wrong (or does it?) and Hoult is on the run and Jones is Pauline being imperiled and so on. Vroom vroom ensues.

Collide is one of those utterly forgettable films which clearly took a lot of care to make yet leaves no impression. It's not that the beats are cribbed from a half-dozen other heist/caper/chase/whatever flicks but that it all feels so inconsequential. Hoult and Jones are pretty and chipper, but Hopkins has this look behind his eyes that he's slumming for the check like so many other former Oscar winners like Nicholas Cage and Robert De Niro have. Kingsley, on the other hand, is having a hammy blast as the Turkish gangster with the golden gun and weird sunglasses he never takes off; he may be slumming, but he's reveling.

The Blu-ray's transfer is clean and colorful and the DTS-Master HD audio track will seriously boom your room with LFE effects, though I had to keep riding the volume between the talking and the chasing. So annoying. There are no extras other than other trailers.

If it wasn't so inconsequential, Collide could've provided some mindless rainy day it's on cable fare, but it just doesn't hit as well as it could have.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Blade Runner: The Final Cut" Blu-ray Review

Six years after my original review - and only 25 months before the events depicted were to have occurred! - my questions about how off the mark the futurists were about 2019 remain valid.

Score: 10/10. Buy it!