Collide (2022)

My second zero-star movie of 2023! The trailer is great, whomever made it should be proud cause they made this steaming pile of crap look interesting, which is a miracle considering how awfully stupid this movie is.
There are several people in a restaurant called Collide, who we meet in quick succession, to find out what their story and conflict will be. With the first couple, Lily and Zee, who work at the restaurant, all we really get are a bunch of character beats: they are young, attractive, dumb, pregnant, and did I say stupid? Whomever wrote this movie had at least 12 ideas for each couple and used every.single.one of them, regardless of whether it makes sense to overburden a single plot with so many threads in one relatively short movie. Zee has apparently been stealing stuff for his boss, the restaurant manager, yet the manager (I think his name is Stu) treats Zee and Lily like crap all the time, acting as if Zee is stealing the merchandise for himself, rather than for Stu. Maybe I made this part up about what was really going on with the missing restaurant inventory, but with everything else thrown into this movie, I can be forgiven for confusing a few things.
Zee, and/or Lily have also come to have a rather substantial amount of cocaine that he has decided to sell to his friendly neighborhood gangster. There is no detail provided on where it came from or how he hooked up with the gangster to sell it during his shift that night. Zee’s just released from prison brother shows up, follows him to the buy and causes mayhem that leads to the climax of the movie. This is after Zee has most likely killed the independent auditor (not sure what else you would call him) who was at the restaurant to count the inventory to account for what the owners suspect has gone missing. You see, Zee had the cocaine hidden in the restaurant’s walk-in (!) rather than in the locker that pretty much EVERY restaurant provides for their staff and had to do something to keep the auditor from finding it, so he hit him in the face with a fish. I wish I were making that up.
The second couple, Angie (Drea de Matteo) and Peter (Jim Gaffigan) who have to be the most mismatched screen couple of all time, are having a marriage crisis. She is cheating on him with the sleazy, stealing restaurant manager, Stu, while also planning to open a restaurant with him (I think, again, I could have made up that detail). Jim wants to kill himself outside of the restaurant, due to how heartbroken he is over Angie’s affair, but is thwarted when he is rear-ended. The real crazy thing about that is when the driver who hit him demands Peter give him his driver’s license info, even though he hit Peter! He is SO insistent, that Peter agrees to let this guy follow him home, so he can retrieve his wallet. Before his car was hit, Peter had called into some very weird MRA-type radio show (who listens to radio call in shows anymore, unless they are sports-related??) but whatever. Peter said ON-AIR that he wanted to die because his wife is cheating on him. Rather than IMMEDIATELY asking him where he was or otherwise trying to help SOMEONE WHO JUST TOLD YOU AND YOUR AUDIENCE THAT HE IS GOING TO KILL HIMSELF, the host tells him to stop apologizing and basically get over it. He does then show some compassion and calls Peter back, making sure he is okay. This show of concern is enough to make Peter actually grow a pair, do a u-turn, so the world’s angriest rear-ender can no longer follow him home, and drives up onto the sidewalk outside Collide, to confront Angie. Of course, because this movie is so poorly made, Angie comes right out and has the most awkward conversation, if you can call it that, where Peter tells her he knows she is cheating, but that since affairs are easy and the love she is looking for is hard, Angie should work on her marriage with Peter. Rather than seeing how this plays out, we cut back to the world’s worst drug buy, which is going on in the alley behind the restaurant.
Last, but oh boy, certainly not least, are Hunter (Ryan Phillippe) and Tamira (Kat Graham) who are on a blind date. Talk about throwing everything at the wall and using everything, no matter how stupid! The real conflict in the movie rests with them. For many, many reasons, Tamira wants Hunter to hurt. Apparently, Tamira is from South Africa, where she was an indentured slave at a winery as a child, forced to work in the fields in the blazing heat, without food or water, only being given rancid wine that was unfit to sell, to parch her thirst. This caused her to become an alcoholic. Eventually she was rescued by her parents (I honestly can’t remember where they were, maybe in jail for some reason). They bring her to the U.S since no decent rehab in South Africa would allow a young black girl to be treated in their facility. This is the first record scratch in the movie. If Tamira were older, and had lived in S.A. during apartheid, I might believe this, but she looks to be in her 30s, so I have to call bullshit on this. Hunter tries to point this out actually, but his facts are completely wrong. He tells her apartheid ended 20 years ago, but unless this movie isn’t supposed to take place in 2022, he’s wrong by about 10 years. Why bring in the racism in such a ridiculous way?? Just say her parents brought her to the U.S. for the best treatment possible. Although, how could they have possibly done so? Weren’t they also persecuted; where did they get the money to come here? Who knows? Tamira also tells Hunter that he and/or his family are to blame for not only the death of her parents, but also the death of some black boy. Also, as Hunter pushed back on Tamira’s rant, trying to tell her that she should get over her losses and be happy and not blame him for anything simply because he is white, she reaches under the table and places her artificial foot on her plate! What am I watching, who thought that made sense?? She says she lost her foot (as a little girl, again, how long was her childhood) in a political fight of some sort. Then, then, Hunter all of a sudden feels bad and takes the blame for killing someone, running over him. Some random black child he accidentally ran over during the night, while drunk, I suppose. I thought this child was her son, but I really don’t think so. Again, this could be a detail I missed due to the overly-loud music cues and just the randomness of this movie and the word vomit coming out of Tamira’s mouth. How this actress got through this without laughing is beyond me. Perhaps she was actually drunk during the filming; I wish I had been while watching it.
I haven’t mentioned the best part though. Before she got too deep into her story, Tamira told Hunter that his chair was booby-trapped with a bomb and that if he got up, it would explode. At the end of her story, once Hunter confesses to everything, she admits that once the time runs out on the bomb, it will click off and her will be able to get up. WHAT THE WHAT??!?? I understand that the writers felt the need to have something dramatic that would force him to stay seated in the restaurant while she walked through her sad tale, but the drama of showing a bomb with a ticking countdown was only for the audience. Hunter never saw or heard it, so WE are the only ones who actually thought it was going to explode. There was no need to show it. Not showing it would have led to more tension, I think, rather than the countdown to nowhere. Also, how would she get a bomb strapped to the underside of the chair?? She didn’t work in the restaurant, so how did that go down? Who knows and the writers don’t care to explain anything so why should I care if they don’t?
OK, we are down to the final few minutes on the bomb countdown, so Hunter and Tamira can safely exit. At the same time, Peter and Angie are outside, as he is talking to her on the sidewalk and Lily and Zee are in the alley, as Zee’s brother demands Zee give him the cocaine, rather than giving it to the gangster. This is the most weirdly staged Mexican standoff ever. Zee’s brother and his crew are simultaneously threatening Zee and the gangster’s crew, while the gangster’s crew is simultaneously threatening Zee and his brother’s crew. Zee clearly has no options; someone is going to kill him one way or the other. Someone finally fires their gun, hitting no one, but as the bullet bounces off the car, Zee runs. He ENTERS THE RESTAURANT for some dumb reason, now endangering the staff and guests since the gangsters and his brother’s crew are chasing him. They all enter the restaurant as Zee and Lily run to the back to leave that way. Someone fires at him but Zee isn’t hit. Then, we pan over to Hunter and Tamira. Slowly, Hunter falls out of his chair; he has been shot! Without his weight on the chair, the bomb explodes. The effects of the explosion are AWESOME!! We see a weirdly CGI-looking cloud of white smoke, then a chair and a table that are on fire slowly float through the air. We’re outside the restaurant, Peter and Angie were saved by their car, I think. They are covered in soot but seem to be ok. Zee and Lily stumble outside; Zee is hurt and collapses at one point as they run away, with either the drugs or the money, I honestly lost track of what is in the briefcase he is carrying and somehow managed to keep his grip on in the explosion. Lily tells Zee to get up, which he does, and they walk away, fade out.
So, I guess everyone in the restaurant died, since we don’t see the aftermath for any of them. It is as if they ran out of money and couldn’t properly finish the movie, but they didn’t do anything else properly, so why should the ending be good?? The sound was awful, the music cues were terrible, the camera work was shaky-cam and zooms throughout and the script is laughably bad. Everyone involved in this movie should be ashamed, what a waste of time and money. With a lot of bad movies you can say that at least the premise was good, but clearly those involved lost their way or didn’t have the proper budget to do their movie justice. That is not the case here. Every idea was bad, there was no redeeming this in any way. If they had all died or all lived, it wouldn’t have mattered as none of the characters had anything good going for them. What was the actual point of any of this? My sympathy lies with the baby in Lily’s uterus; it is going to have a GREAT life with them as parents.
I would honestly give this movie negative stars, since it owes me my time back for watching it. Absolutely one of the worst movies ever made. 0 out of 5 stars.