Catastrophe en plein ciel

Sometimes you know with 99,9% certitude you'll be watching a dumb and terribly bad movie, but you persevere for personal reasons anyways. Literally everything about "Collision Course" screams out it's an inferior B-movie (not in the least the prominently featuring label of production company SyFy-Channel), but I wanted to see it because I have a fondness for disaster movies set on airplanes or airports, and because Tia Carrere is one the - admittedly many - hot actresses I had a crush on in the 1990s because of her cool roles in "Wayne's World" and "Showdown in Little Tokyo". She still looks gorgeous!

"Collision Course" is mind-numbingly bad, but you have to admit one thing. When director Fred Olen Ray goes over the top, he does it tremendously! Everything goes in the script of this action/disaster flick that simultaneously also wants to be a heartbreaking family drama AND an allegory against racial prejudices. Unannounced solar flare storms destruct all technical equipment in the USA and seriously mess up the airline traffic. Pilots get electrocuted and die, auto-pilot systems break down, radio & radar connections are lost. Luckily, there's a successful female novelist aboard the flight from Chicago to LA, and she can perfectly fly - and spectacularly land - a plane because her deceased husband once showed her how in a flight simulator many years ago. What are the odds! Will she be able to concentrate, though, because she must also face racist redneck passengers and an aggressive dog in the cargo that only listens to commands in German.

It's a horrendous movie, obviously, but it guarantees undemanding entertainment, especially if you watch it with one or several buddies and accompanied with beer. The most astonishing element of the script is how calm and disciplined the vast majority of passengers on this plane are. These people witness how a dead pilot is dragged from the cockpit to the back of the plane, they literally see the co-pilot dying in the arms of an incompetent med-student and find themselves in the middle of a fight between a redneck and a Muslim accused of terrorism! But how do the passengers react? They politely remain in their seats and do not panic at all. That is beautiful. In reality, pure chaos would kill everyone aboard before the plane even has the chance to crash.

Bad acting, bad script, bad special effects, bad.... Everything. Tia must have been desperate for money. Also, her face looks very fat. Not worth your time. Skip this one.

This may be the single worst movie I have ever seen. Crippled by a deadly solar flare, an airplane continues to fly on autopilot after the captain is electrocuted and the co-pilot is incapacitated. Far-fetched but at least plausible. However, the writing, acting and visual look and effects are on the level of the sophomore class play. It's all so bad that it borders on the classic level of "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Clichés are elevated to an art form, the characters are stunningly one- dimensional and the story is fully disconnected from facts and reality. How this movie was ever funded is beyond me. How people get paid to create drivel like this is astounding. I feel especially bad for Dee Wallace, a good actress who gamely gave it her all in a secondary role. The best thing about this movie is that eventually it ended.

When I sat down to watch "Collision Course", I must admit that I had initially set myself up for expecting a very poor B-movie with questionable effect and possibly equally questionable acting. However, I will say that I was more than pleasantly surprised with the outcome of "Collision Course".

Granted, this is not a bright, shiny moment in the history of cinema, but it was still entertaining enough for what it was, and it was actually fairly enjoyable as well. Sure, the storyline was generic and had been seen countless times before in other movies.

Kate (played by Tia Carrere) is an author out promoting her new book, when she is returning back home by airplane. However, a powerful solar flare disables the systems aboard the plane, kills the pilot and injures the co-pilot. As panic sets in, the passengers must step up and find a way to return safely to the ground.

The acting in the movie was adequate, and Tia Carrere performed well in "Collision Course". It was also nice to have Dee Wallace and David Chokachi star in this movie, as they did quite alright right alongside Tia Carrere.

"Collision Course" had fair enough special effects and CGI, although it was scarce. But what was there served their purpose well enough.

Certain things throughout the movie made little or no sense at all, such as how easy it was to hack a satellite, or why planes on collision course doesn't just turn from their current path in order to prevent a midair collision, especially when at night and the flight lights are clearly visible kilometers away. Or how quickly the flight director overcame his guilt of two planes crashing and hundreds dying and wholly forgot all about it.

This is an entertaining enough movie for what it was, and it turned out to be a nice surprise actually. But chances are that you have already seen a movie with a storyline fully similar to "Collision Course". And once you have seen it, then chances are slim that you will actually sit down and watch it again.

Collision Course may not quite be bad enough to be on a personal worst movies ever list or the very worst movie to air on the SyFy Channel(any contenders for that title make for a very large number). That is saying next to nothing though, because it still has everything bad about melodrama/disaster movies at their worst. To search for a redeeming quality you'd have to look very hard, but for anything that came across as least bad about Collision Course it was Dee Wallace who does try to give some compassion to material that was beneath her. Generally in regard to the acting Collision Course is a very poorly-acted film, with the actors ranging from overwrought emotion(Tia Carrere applies here) to no emotion or acting skills at all. The acting is not the only bad thing, everything about Collision Course is bad. The drab look of the movie is very unappealing, and further disadvantaged by about 20 years out of date special effects that show no signs texture, shading or proportion and simplistic camera work. The dialogue gives meaning to the term banal and practically insults it too and gets increasingly turgid and predictable. The story shows no tension, fear of characters' predicaments or heart, and instead consists of very questionable science/maths, pedestrian pacing and ham-fisted melodrama. The characters are also the sort that we never care for or know anything about, that they're written in such a cardboard fashion and acted lazily doesn't help. Overall, there's worse out there- you'll agree or disagree here- but Collision Course at the end of the day was very difficult to endure. 1/10 Bethany Cox