After We Collided (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this is awkward. Between After being one of the worst films I saw last year, and seeing just how bad Fifty Shades rip-offs can get with 365 Days, I was fully expecting to hate this movie. But honestly… I had a lot of fun with this.

The actors seem to be properly fitted to their characters by this point, and while the characters haven’t drastically improved or anything, the people playing them seem to be having fun now. Josephine Langford is still a bit of a blank slate (or, to be more accurate, a Lego brick), but she’s a brick with moxie which gives at least some life to her delivery.

As for Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, he manages to work with the highly pretentious sad boi he’s been saddled with, and with how unhealthy their relationship remains (arguably, it’s worse this time around), he sells how much Hardin wants to do right by Langford’s Tessa. Also, Dylan Sprouse’s dry delivery as Trevor is legitimately good, making for that rare romantic third wheel worth watching.

There’s also the general aesthetic of the film to go over, which not only isn’t as painfully twee as before, but we’ve reached a genuine breakthrough: It’s not trying to be more than it is. There’s no pretence of this being well-read or sophisticated, or even all that good, and in a single line of dialogue, it manages to contextualise both this series and the series it’s been ripping off as romantic fiction that’s not meant to be taken all that seriously. It may still try to aim for emotional poignancy, but it’s never with the approach that it’s pulling something over the audience; it’s silly and it knows it.

Then again, that might just be a reaction to the film’s potty mouth; once again, we have a film that reads like it just discovered what curses are and wants to show off this amazing new discovery to everyone in earshot.

 

Don’t get me wrong about any of this, though; just because it’s entertaining and it’s made some improvements doesn’t mean it’s all that good. The core relationship is still insanely unstable, to the point where it almost turns into a contest for who is the worst partner, and the plot developments written around it are flat-out embarrassing.

It’s a very curious blend of plot points that come right out of nowhere, don’t mean anything, and are piled up so suffocatingly close to each other that the actual story of the film is pretty much non-existent. And when said points involve a car crash, lying to your mother that you’re still together, alcohol abuse all over the place, and one of the most ludicrous bits of sequel-baiting I have ever fucking seen (I swear, I’ll start giggling as soon as anyone says “Dad?” around me for the rest of my life), that’s not a good sign.

This means that, while it’s easier to watch Tessa and Hardin on-screen together (I’ll admit it, the sex scenes are actually pretty hot, which is rarer than it should be for these flicks), they aren’t given all that much to do. Must be why all the drama (or drama-based substitute that even genre vegans would spit back out) leans on the soundtrack to convey the emotion of it all, managing to outclass even Fifty Shades in how fanfiction it is.

All of this equals up to a pretty bad film, but a damn entertaining one. It goes past the irksome train wreck of its predecessor and its primary influence and actually comes to terms with what it is, who it’s made for, and why outsiders would ever dream of watching it in the first place. It’s basically what I kept on hoping that the Fifty Shades movies would be, which leaves me in a bit of a bizarre situation. After… well, After, I felt like I needed to start mourning for the film industry if fanfic adaptation is where it had sunk to. After After We Collided, and seeing the film industry go to shit for entirely different reasons… not gonna lie, I want to see what else this 5^th wave has in store for us.