Bargain Bin Review: Collision Course (1989)

 

Happy New Year! It’s been a minute since I covered a stinker of a film – you know, bread and butter of The ‘Bin – so I’m kicking off the new year with a proper bad movie.

And I won’t lie to you, it was a bummer. I have a whole backlog of movies that I actually want to see. I haven’t seen Top Gun: Maverick yet, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. I really want to see Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and See How They Run and even Violent Night cuz I heard it’s way better than it needs to be. But no. Instead, I watched…

 

Directed by Lewis Teague, 1989, 98 minutes, Rated PG
Appropriately, this movie evokes a car wreck.

 

Collision Course is a 1989 buddy cop action-comedy starring Jay Leno and Pat “Mr. Miyagi” Morita. Oh, did you not know Jay Leno starred in his own movie? You’re about to find out why.

We open with Jay Leno driving a classic Chevy – hey, did he help write this? – down a Detroit throughway. He immediately jaws his way into a drag race at a stoplight, and is just as quickly blown out in the race and pulled over for speeding. Jay’s not sweating it, though. Turns out he’s a police detective and claims the officers interrupted his “undercover bust” before swarming his way to getting the pretty female officer’s phone number.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, Industrial Espionage Detective Pat Morita is assigned to track down a stolen prototype for a high-power car engine. He’ll have to chase the chief engineer who stole the prototype to Detroit. His plane leaves in two hours. Pat’s investigation is almost immediately derailed when the chief engineer is bumped off by a murder’s row of character actors: Tom Noonan, “Tex” Cobb and, leading the charge with a fantastic mustache, Chris Sarandon.

Glorious

 

Not that the baddies need a lot of help derailing the investigation, because – and I can’t stress this enough – Jay Leno’s Det. Tony Costas is a terrible cop. Pat Morita’s Inspector Natsuo is competent enough, but Leno’s Costas is so bad that he pretty much hinders the investigation for half the movie. Here’s a partial list of the things he does during the course of the film:

• Lifts evidence from an active crime scene
• Actively investigates a case he’s not assigned to
• Invents “probably cause” as an excuse to break into places
• Never shows his badge when confronting suspects (choosing instead to just pointing his gun at them – while in street clothes), identifies himself as an officer or reads them their rights when apprehending them
• Regularly shoves people out of the way, shouting “Police business!”
• Racially profiles Pat Morita, even commanding hotel security to “just hold anybody who looks different.”

Yeah, we should probably talk about the casual racism permeating the film. It’s tiresome, far nastier than anything you’d see in buddy comedies like Rush Hour or Shanghai Noon, and Pat Morita deserves better. Exacerbating things is the economic climate at the time this film was made, when there was real fear that Japan would parlay its industrial power to buy up all of America. Morita’s Inspector Natsuo is constantly on the receiving end of that resentment, and by the time Leno gives a speech to demonstrate that the filmmakers know the issue isn’t so cut and dry, it’s too little too late.

And too bad, because there actually are a couple good moments in Collision Course. The image of Pat Morita trying to run off in the garment bag he’s been hiding in is a good one. For reasons that are never explained, Pat Morita’s boss hates him and flies off the handle in every scene in a way that circles around to being goofy. There’s an entire scene of burly, intimidating bowlers heatedly debating trade relations and the effects of tariffs – I could’ve watched a whole movie of just that. Finally, there’s an inexplicable moment where Pat Morita faces off against an oncoming car and dropkicks the driver through the windshield. It’s stunning stupid, and absolutely my kind of stupid.

You don't believe me, do you? Fine:

 

Unfortunately, those stunning stupid moments are few and far between. The rest of the movie is just regular ol’ boring stupid.

**