Remember “The ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ Paradox” that was bandied about some years back? It posited that the film was fine, save for the fact that nothing Indiana Jones did truly altered the outcome of the story.
I was thinking of that in the latter acts of the new Spanish Netflix thriller “Collision Course.” It’s a too-too gimmicky heist-goes-wrong tale that invites “What was the point of all that?” as the Big Gimmick is repeated and repeated and repeated.
And I also recalled sitting in on a new film school’s first day “directing” class for a story I was reporting. One of the would-be-Scorseses rehearsed his actors through a scene, then announced that they would switch characters and play other parts in this next rehearsal.
The professor stopped the show and gave one and all a lecture on such “cute” “exercises” in scripts or in pre-production rehearsals. He didn’t mince words. They’re stupid…Don’t waste the class’s time or “in the real world,” the producers’ time, he barked. “Are you going to waste the AUDIENCE’s time, too,” he wanted to know?
“Collision Course,” set during one of the many Spanish banking crises (2012-2013) of recent decades, shows us four dirty cops pulling a bank job that goes wrong. We see the panic, confusion and mistrust that sets in during the getaway, which is interrupted by a crash that kills one of the gang members.
The movie is about the perps trying to cover up their crime from their fellow cops — who are going to identify the body of their dead comrade any minute now — and figure out what went wrong and who double-crossed whom in terms of “the take” from the masked armed robbery.
But screenwriter Ramón Campos and director and co-writer Daniel Sánchez Arévalo thought it would be “cute” to show a different member of the gang — cop Ernesto (Luis Zahera), detective Carla (Laia Costa), forensics crime scene specialist Tomás (Tomar Novas) or retired cop Pedro (Karra Elejalde) — killed as a way of showing us the same crime and accident and investigation, but with different outcomes.
The only reason for this is to make a too-obvious point about never betting against the most obvious villain, in crime thrillers or in life. But that’s just weak, a tepid excuse for stretching out and bending a proven formula that loses all its urgency and suspense thanks to the gimmick.
There was nobody in Campos or Arévalo’s schooling or pre-production meetings to remind them “This is stupid. Are you going to waste the audience’s time?”
The caper is brutally staged. The car wreck — a vivid rollover with glass and noise and slo-mo violence — is repeated with each iteration of this or that character’s changing story arc, dulling the impact and shock of the crash.
We can’t invest in any performance or any character’s efforts to avoid discovery by the dogged old detective (Lluís Homar) assigned the case, thanks to the filmmakers’ decision to get too cute.
And every plot wrinkle, including the finale’s, is undercut by this collection of “Which reality are we supposedly seeing here?”
All to delay the “Money is the root of all evil” message at the heart of this tangled, tricky mess of a movie ruined by a first-year-screenwriter’s “own goal” blunder in pre-production.
Rating: TV-MA, violence
Cast: Laia Costa, Karra Elejalde, Luis Zahera, Tomar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes and Lluís Homar
Credits: Directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, scripted by Ramón Campos and Daniel Sánchez Arévalo. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:46
