After We Collided
To be sure, “After” was one of the very worst films of 2019 it took me three tries to get through it, and I watch bad movies for a living but its flaws were at least run of the mill; boring characters, dull plotting and zero chemistry between the romantic leads. You could even argue that part of the problem was mine: As insipid as I found it, I wasn’t exactly the target audience for a movie that began life as One Direction fan fiction.
But no matter how bad it seemed, those appearances become borderline-competent in retrospect after you’ve seen “After We Collided,” a follow-up so lazy and inept that it’s contemptuous not just of its audience but of itself.
For those who missed “After” (and congrats!), Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) is a bookish college student with an overbearing mother (Selma Blair). Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is a campus Lothario whose bad-boy exterior hides a tortured soul only she can heal. We watched them go out and older ones among us squinted in confusion as Jennifer Beals and Peter Gallagher appeared on screen for five seconds each until we learned that he’d only dared himself to woo her. She dumped him anyway, because duh, but in the end came around on giving their relationship another try.
That happy ending, it turns out, was just a dream Hardin had while sleeping off his bender from the night before: One month later, when we catch up with him again at the start of “After We Collided,” he’s still drinking through every day and brooding over lost love.
Meanwhile, Tessa has bounced back slightly more emphatically by landing her first day of work at a publishing house internship reading manuscripts; discovering her boss’ next best-seller submission; being taken out by said boss for a night of clubbing with investors (complete with new dress and hotel suite on the company dime); and batting eyelashes at shy but hunky accountant Trevor (Dylan Sprouse), who has his own secret pain, which we know because he wears cardigans.
But her feelings for Hardin are obviously still there, so when his mother (Louise Lombard) flies in from England under the impression that they’re still together don’t ask Tessa goes along. Which leads to scene after scene of the two having what a wiser man once called “rumpy pumpy” and then bickering over things that would be easily solved if they didn’t share the IQ of a crouton.
Hardin’s miserable past has haunted him when he crashes his rich father’s (Rob Estes) Christmas party with Tessa and his mother (Karimah Westbrook), getting drunk and making a scene. What happens is unimportant the movie certainly doesn’t care but fans of the first film may not even notice because Gallagher and Beals played these roles the first time around and somehow avoided appearing here, presumably by building and piloting a homemade hot-air balloon to freedom.
This is especially strange, since Selma Blair returns for an even shorter, more pointless turn than before, which can only mean either her co-stars kept her in the dark about the balloon or she stuck with director Roger Kumble out of misplaced loyalty from their work together on “Cruel Intentions.” So what exactly is so bad about “After We Collided”? First off, there isn’t really a story in this screenplay (by Todd and Mario Celaya), just a bunch of incidents in a relationship that couldn’t rightly be called one because they’re both so extremely toxic and absolutely innocuous.
The two central characters are somehow less interesting than they were before; it doesn’t help that there still isn’t any chemistry between them. Most comically, in an effort to shake off its PG-13 roots, this film goes R-rated in all the wrong ways: The script drops F-bombs with all the subtlety of a 10-year old who’s just learned how to use them, while sex scenes have such little heat that if this movie were an oven you’d check the pilot light. Too dumb to work as serious romantic drama and too boring to work as straight up trash, “After We Collided” is such an idiotic experience I worry some people will be tempted to look it up just to see if it really is as bad as I’m saying.
Instead of doing that, might I recommend you go watch “The Souvenir,” Joanna Hogg’s tender and true depiction of a passionate-but-toxic relationship that was one of last year’s very best films one that will stay with you long after it’s over. All you’ll feel at the end of this movie, after a brief moment of relief, is the sinking realization we still have two more installments to go in this series. But then maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll turn out to be nothing more than a dream, too.
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