Collide (2016)

Collide is a 2016 action thriller about an American backpacker in Cologne who becomes a driver for drug smugglers and then steals from them to pay for his girlfriend's kidney operation. It is 99 minutes of vehicular mayhem, and it has no interest in being anything else. The film's social consciousness is minimal, almost aggressively so. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Marwan Kenzari and Erdal Yıldız appearing in supporting roles as natural fixtures of a German crime story. No commentary attaches to them. They are simply there, like the autobahn.

Felicity Jones's Juliette exists to be ailing. Her kidney failure is the engine of the plot, and she spends most of the film as a medical emergency with a face. This is not a feminist statement, nor is it an anti-feminist one. It is a screenwriting convenience. The film engages no racial themes or queer subtext, and it has no environmental or bodily politics to speak of. Neurodivergence does not enter the frame. Its antagonists are drug dealers, but the script offers no critique of wealth or class. Crime is a backdrop for chase choreography. There is no sermon here, no lecture, no message. The movie is too busy staging a car crash to tell us how to live.

The remainder is a curious artifact. It has Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley in full ham, a Cologne setting, and a box office record for second-week decline that suggests audiences were not persuaded. The film is not offensively regressive; it is simply empty of the modern cultural markers that would give a critic something to parse. It is a genre exercise, lean and forgettable. For those who track such things, Collide registers as a near-zero on the social consciousness scale, a film that predates nothing and argues nothing. It simply collides, briefly, and then stops.