My World of Flops Cinematic Clunker Case File #161 Collision Course (1989)

Jay Leno—driving a car?!?—it happened!

Improbably enough, there was a time when Jay Leno was considered hip, cool, a sharp young man on the go beloved by his even hipper, even cooler contemporary David Letterman, who invited him on his show more often than almost any other guest, and Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, which he would of course take over after the great man stepped down. 

In his 1980s prime, Leno was funny and quick, a hard worker with terrific jokes and a scarily efficient and effective delivery. He was never exactly handsome but he wasn’t bad looking either, a baby-faced joke-slinger you could bring home to mother. 

Then at some point Leno went over to the dark side and became not just a hack but the personification of the triumph of mediocrity. The road to comedy hell for Leno was paved with innocuous intentions. He became the most hated and mocked figure in comedy in no small part by trying not to offend anybody, in being bipartisan in a way that rendered his political comedy toothless and banal, less political than “political.” 

From the vantage point of pandemic-wracked 2020, the war between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien over The Tonight Show now seems like much ado about almost nothing but at the time it was seen as a conflict between good and evil, with Leno serving as the denim-clad anti-Christ prostituting his once formidable gift to his corporate masters for untold millions and all the jean jackets and classic cars his greedy little heart could possibly crave. 

Leno dumbed it down for the rubes and due to the central place The Tonight Show occupies and used to occupy in pop culture but particularly in comedy, this babyface turned heel single-handedly made the world of comedy a shittier, less funny and less original place. There’s a reason Leno's name has become shorthand for lame comedy devoid of edge and pathetically eager to please the blandest human beings in the world: it’s because he really is that bad, and that cynical. 

So there was at least some logic behind casting Leno as an adorably xenophobic, lovably racist cop with a quip and a racial put-down for every occasion in the staggeringly ill-conceived racism-powered mismatched buddy cop comedy Collision Course, which was filmed in 1987 but was not released until 1989, in the sense that it was ever really released at all. After all, the contemporary buddy cop comedy boom was fueled by the twin triumphs of 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop, which rocketed a similarly hot stand-up comedian named Eddie Murphy to superstardom. 

Name a more iconic duo!

Of course there is no such thing as a lovable racist and the phrase “adorably xenophobic” is an oxymoron but Collision Course genuinely seems to think audiences will be onboard with its protagonist’s reflective hatred for the Japanese since he evolves over the course of the film from a racist monster to a slightly less racist monster. 

Leno’s renegade cop spends much of the film’s second act doggedly investigating soon to be partner Detective Fujitsuka Natsuo’s (Pat Morita) dogged investigator on the logic that since the older lawman is lurking about being flagrantly, unapologetically Japanese, he must be up to something sinister, possibly spy-related. 

Leno’s auto enthusiast is angry at Morita’s fish out of water because he holds him single-handedly responsible for the decline of Detroit as an industrial powerhouse, complaining, "you guys came along with your tin can cars and slave wages and put everyone out of business.” 

Anyway, he’s our hero, the guy we’re rooting for and identifying with. Though Robert Resnikoff and Frank Darius Namei are the credited screenwriters, when I interviewed Tom Noonan for Random Roles he gave me the hot exclusive that he contributed to the script as well. I asked how he got involved in the film and he answered: 

“Bob Clark! Bob Clark called me up one day. It’s gonna sound like a showbiz story, but he actually called me through my agent and said, “We’ve got this script, we don’t really like the script, but I loved what you’ve done in the past couple of movies you’ve done. I’d love to work with you. Come to L.A. and I’ll put you in the room with our writers, and we’ll do anything you want.” And so I went to L.A.—he actually meant that day. I sat with these guys for a couple days, and I said, “You know, within the framework of this idea, this sort of thing would be fun for me to do,” and they rewrote the whole script. And it was actually doable. It wasn’t amazing, but it was good. And I like Bob Clark, so I passed up doing this other movie called D.O.A. it was a really nice part, but it wasn’t as good as what I was working on, and I had this connection to Bob Clark. So I passed on that, and I went down to shoot Collision Course.

 I got to Wilmington, where I’d shot a lot—I think I did Manhunter there—not sure if I did one before the other, but I think I did it after. Sort of embarrassing to say. So we went to the set the first day, and I waited in the trailer all day, and we never shot. And the next day came, and I waited half the day, and we weren’t shooting. And I was thinking “What’s going on?” And the producer comes to my camper, and he goes, “Tom! I have good news and even better news.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Well, we fired Bob Clark.” And I said “Oh, really? Shit, why’d you do that?” And he said, “Well, he’s just not a guy… He wasn’t really working with us. So we got somebody great comin’ in. But the better news is, we’re going back to the original script.” 

Which is this horrible script. So I’m now saying to my agent, “Do I have to do this movie now? Can they actually make me do it?” And he said “Well, you can walk off if they haven’t shot you yet, but it’s not a great thing, to leave a movie.” And I’m not a troublemaker person, I’m a cooperative guy, but I didn’t know what to do, so I struggled through the rest of the movie. And actually, I wrote a lot of the movie, because at the time, I had been writing a lot by then, and the director and I became sort of friendly, and I—I probably shouldn’t say this—but I wrote a lot of the stuff that we ended up shooting and gave other people credit for it. I would put sheets under the doors of the producers and the director at night, and those sheets would be the pages we would shoot the next day. So the movie moved back to a little better for me. At least the scenes I was in, I helped change a little.”

#BetterTitle

Getting fired from a project as dire as Collision Course has to be a tough break, but not as brutal as getting hired for an equally misconceived buddy cop comedy in Loose Cannons, the previous entry in both My World of Flops and Mismatched Buddy Cop Movie Month. 

Instead of being directed by the man who brought the world Black Christmas and A Christmas Story the culture clash comedy was helmed by journeyman Lewis Teague, who worked his way up through the Corman factory, distinguishing himself with overachieving genre movies like The Lady in Red and Alligator, both written by up and coming screenwriter and actor John Sayles. 

Teague, fresh off the hit sequel Jewel of the Nile, brings a journeyman’s bland competence to the story of Tony Costas (Leno), a car-loving cop in Detroit who ends up joining forces with Detective Fujitsuka Natsuo after spending half the movie witlessly insulting him.

I was expecting Morita’s entrance to be accompanied by a loud, comical gong but, to the film’s credit, the gong doesn’t come until ten seconds after his first appearance, when he enters a room with his superiors, and it is a relatively muted gong. 

The rest of the film’s racism is nowhere near as understated. Academy Award nominee Morita’s first English words are “Read my rips” to a glowering American cop who, like every other American in the film, calls the diminutive fish out of water every Japanese word they know, most of which are the names of either car manufacturers or electronics brands. Over the course of the film’s first act alone, he’s referred to as, alternately, “Toyota”, “Mitsubishi”, “Kawasaki”, “Teriyaki”, “Tojo”, “Honda”, “Sushi” and “Sanyo.”

Morita’s thickly accented cop is dispatched from his native Japan to gritty and bombed out Detroit to look for the movie’s MacGuffin, a revolutionary turbo-charger known as The Prototype. When Tony’s ex-partner is killed by Scully (Tom Noonan) with a rocket gun after stumbling onto Scully and his sidekick/enforcer Kosnic (Randall “Tex” Cobb) terrorizing Oshima, the man who has stolen the prototype for the purpose of selling it to the highest bidder, the case becomes personal for Tony, forcing Leno to emote regularly and unsuccessfully. 

Leno’s jeans-clad detective doesn’t trust Morita’s quietly dignified lawman because he’s Asian and American-car-loving Americans were apparently legally obligated to hate the Japanese individually and collectively because of Japan’s economic and automotive superiority. So even though we know Fujitsuka is a good, competent man just doing his job, we see him the way our ostensible hero does: as a suspicious foreigner clearly up to something, even if that “something” turns out to be “doing his job” and “solving the case.” 

After charming his international colleague with banter like, “I OUGHT TO STIR-FRY YOUR FACE”, “I think you’re a spy!” and “I need to know why I shouldn’t put my foot up your ass!” Tony eventually warms up to his unlikely partner when he proves to be a dedicated and fearless cop and also not single-handedly responsible for the decline of the American automobile industry. 

From a nostalgia standpoint, I found Collision Course fascinating primarily for the look it provides into Motor city in the 1980s. There’s a desolate beauty to the rubble, a curious lyricism to the city’s rot and decay. 

Noonan does, indeed, elevate the film whenever he’s onscreen. No movie in which Tom Noonan fires a motherfucking BAZOOKA at Jay Leno is entirely without interest. Poor Randall “Tex” Cobb: perpetually doomed to play the brute and never the poet. The same cannot be said of Noonan, who played both side of the high-low culture divide as both a highbrow playwright and heavyweight thespian in independent film and a menacing giant and fixture of genre fare like Monster Squad, Robocop 2, House of the Devil and this garbage. 

Noonan, Cobb and Chris Sarandon (as a suavely mustachioed kingpin in search of the Prototype) are so much better than the film they’re stuck in that I couldn’t help but fantasize about this overqualified trio escaping from Collision Course into a better movie that has some idea how to use their unique and idiosyncratic talents.

Morita instills his character with as much dignity as possible but it’s an uphill struggle when his character’s big moment involves running at a speeding car and, using the kind of physics generally only seen in Street Fighter games, unleashing a flying kick with such force that he kicks through a bad guy’s windshield. 

Collision Course grudgingly comes around to the message that racism and stereotyping are ultimately both bad but that half-hearted message would be more convicing if racism and stereotyping didn’t ultimately shape both its depiction of anti-Japanese racists and Japanese characters alike. 

Leno has expressed regret and mortification over his only starring cinematic vehicle. Considering the amount of terrible comedy Leno has been involved with but never expressed shame and remorse over, that’s really saying something. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an unhappy time by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

And of course you can and should buy the Happy Place’s first book in The Weird Accordion to Al, a gorgeously illustrated deep dive into the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic with an introduction from AL himself here

OR you can buy both my 2020 books, The Weird Accordion to Al and Postal, signed, for a mere 33 dollars, shipping included here