Robbie Collin

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The Telegraph
For 1,122 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Robbie Collin's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Sentimental Value
Lowest review score: 0 Christmas Karma
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 601 out of 1122
  2. Mixed: 424 out of 1122
  3. Negative: 97 out of 1122
1122 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Avatar: Fire and Ash
    Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Fackham Hall
    Usually, a spoof franchise would only feel this exhausted by the second or third sequel, so I suppose Fackham Hall deserves points for efficiency at least.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Wicked: For Good
    A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    Pike’s preposterous accent is as close as the film ever comes to acknowledging its own premise’s inherent corniness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Robbie Collin
    Christmas Karma
    It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Twits
    If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    TRON: Ares
    A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Smurfs
    It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Honey Don't!
    In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Leave One Day
    Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Ne Zha 2
    As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    We Live in Time
    The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Venom: The Last Dance
    As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Baby Invasion
    Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Deadpool & Wolverine
    The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Madame Web
    All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Argylle
    The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Padre Pio
    In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Next Goal Wins
    After a while, it’s as if Thomas’s self-loathing begins to rub off on the script, which keeps undercutting should-be-resonant moments with smirking references to other films.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Marvels
    The shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Dance First
    A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Expend4bles
    How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    DogMan
    There was barely a scene in Dogman that didn’t have me yelping in disbelief.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    Every shot is sluiced in flat grey light – the action scenes look like gravel in a food processor – while the dialogue is all botched quips and clichés (“Did somebody order backup?” one Transformer smarms while cocking a rocket launcher), and the human characters timidly written nobodies.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
    The whole thing is stupefyingly unfunny and un-tense, and doesn’t end so much as just give up and grind to a halt.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Cocaine Bear
    It’s a grinding disappointment all round, though at least now we know that what bears famously do in the woods can extend to their film work.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Avatar: The Way of Water
    For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Only Nyong’o and Winston Duke, whose avuncular mountain tribe chief M’Baku makes a welcome return, actually feel like human beings. Elsewhere it’s drainingly apparent we’re just watching the nth round of chess pieces being rearranged. Like Namor with his dinky ankle-wings, this franchise has become super-heroically adept at treading water.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The School for Good and Evil
    If we’re reaching for something, anything nice to say here – and we absolutely are – Theron’s black trouser suit and trench coat is a strong look.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Pinocchio
    Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Bullet Train
    As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Lightyear
    For perhaps the first time in the studio’s canon, every idea in this ‘origin story’ of the Toy Story astronaut feels woefully half-baked.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Jurassic World Dominion
    This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Bubble
    Some of the jokes here are so bad they may be legally actionabubble, even prosecutabubble, and will cause toes to curl on the feet of the hitherto unembarrassabubble. There are scenes now seared upon my memory through sheer force of murderous un-funniness which I fear may prove to be unscrubbabubble.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    It’s less a film than a compound disaster scenario for comedy: to say I didn’t laugh once is to understate the sheer volume and vehemence of not-laughing I was doing during each of its 106 agonising minutes.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Schumacher
    The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Jolt
    Like the muddled plotting, risible climax and wearisomely foul-mouthed script, Jolt’s budgetary shortcomings might have been endurable if its action scenes passed muster. Alas, they’re barely community theatre standard.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    In place of Bay’s provocative humour and unparalleled eye for destructive spectacle are brain-numbing quantities of strong language, action scenes that look as if they were edited with a knife and fork, and a blasé attitude towards violence that renders every shootout pointless, since the bad guys are invariably mown down in seconds while the heroes saunter off with barely a scratch.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Mortal Kombat
    To call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The combat itself (sorry, kombat) is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape or flow, while the fatalities are rendered in bland, businesslike computer graphics that have you yearning for the honest, artisanal gloop-by-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Wild Mountain Thyme
    A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Love, Weddings & Other Disasters
    Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Tom & Jerry
    Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Malcolm & Marie
    You sense that Washington and Zendaya do both believe in the material, and they certainly throw themselves at it with gusto, but their best moments here are invariably the ones in which they’ve not been given anything to say.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Blithe Spirit
    The irresistible comic elegance of the premise – a remarried widower is tormented by the ghost of his first wife – is lost in a mass of pointless embellishments and tinkerings.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Run Hide Fight
    The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    Sending up the Eurovision Song Contest is like flattening Salisbury Plain: one quick look at the thing should be enough to reassure you that the job took care of itself long ago. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell has decided to give it a shot, and the result is this pulverisingly unfunny and vacuous two-hour gauntlet run of non-tertainment.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Artemis Fowl
    The end product is all but unfollowable, thanks either to a screenplay that was incoherent to begin with, or an edit so slicingly brutal that almost every trace of the plot’s connective tissue was chopped out.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Iron Mask
    Incoherent two-hour fantasy epic isn’t quite accurate: it’s more of an incoherent one-and-a-quarter-hour fantasy epic, plus an all-star warm-up.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Jojo Rabbit
    As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Playmobil: The Movie
    No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Dark Phoenix
    Superheroes do progressive politics these days as a matter of course, and here it just feels like shtick – a box to be dutifully checked, rather than a theme to be meaningfully explored.
    • 10 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
    In short, it’s a bum trip and then some. Kechiche has always been an admirer of the female posterior, but here he shifts styles into what could be called gluteus maximalism, filling the screen with frantically gyrating hindquarters for literal hours on end.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Hustle
    The switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Hellboy
    While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Hunter Killer
    The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Titan
    It’s an entirely calamitous turkey, riddled with plot holes and bewilderingly miscast, which steals ideas from films as diverse as The Fly, Avatar, Soylent Green and Prometheus before fumbling every last one of them, and looks as if it was shot in a show home for £99.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Fifty Shades Freed
    This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Justice League
    It feels like a sheepish feature-length retraction of the franchise to date. It’s consistently embarrassing to watch, and features plot holes so yawningly vast they have a kind of Grand Canyon-like splendour: part of you wants to hang around to see what they look like at sunset.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Geostorm
    Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    This crazily overlong and tiresome follow-up...doesn’t seem to have the first idea what to do with itself – not least when it comes to its much-vaunted all-star cast, the majority of whom are barely even in it.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    American Assassin
    American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Hitman's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Wish Upon
    Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Emoji Movie
    As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Based on a True Story
    Nothing in this feeble psychological thriller rings true for a moment, though its unhinged machinations feel as pedestrian as soap opera in execution.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    War Machine
    A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    CHIPS
    Often the film resorts to that unforgivable cheat move of having the supporting cast laugh at its leads’ antics on screen, in the hope of prompting us to do likewise. Instead I found myself curling over in such a paralysing cringe, my body had to be rolled out of the cinema afterwards like a dented bicycle wheel.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Saban's Power Rangers
    The ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Great Wall
    From blundered opening to risible conclusion, it’s a wall-to-wall fiasco.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Collateral Beauty
    I still can’t quite believe it exists, though I may yet find myself shouting about it on the street.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Inferno
    While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Nine Lives
    Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Ratchet & Clank
    In a golden period for both animation and children’s filmmaking, here is a head-splitting reminder of just how bad those two things can get.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Ted 2
    If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Seventh Son
    Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Unfinished Business
    Mawkishness, gay panic, and lazy jokes make Vince Vaughn's workplace comedy considerably less fun than work itself.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Mortdecai
    A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Taken 3
    Each individual moment in the film barely seems to be on speaking terms with the rest.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Underdogs
    In a memorably bad summer for children’s films, this, surely, is as low as things can sink.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Hector and the Search for Happiness
    What distinguishes the film from last year’s backpacking adventure, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, apart from its lobotomised worldview and charred, corroded soul, are Hector’s philosophical musings – “people who are afraid of death are afraid of life,” is one – that pop up on screen in a handwritten font whenever a lesson has been learnt.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Grace of Monaco
    You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Lost River
    The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Winter's Tale
    The whole thing is so roaringly absurd, and delivered with such hands-clasped sincerity, that the only rational response is to laugh the house down.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Cuban Fury
    Cuban Fury belongs to an older, unfunnier time. Please let’s not go back.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    That Awkward Moment
    Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.
    • 7 Metascore
    • 0 Robbie Collin
    May I Kill U?
    There may well be a worse film released this year than this unwatchable British black comedy, although it sets a terrifyingly low benchmark.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Movie 43
    After watching Peter Farrelly’s Movie 43, I was immediately overcome with a sudden rush of emotion: not amusement, anger or even mild irritation, but a profound and faintly tragic sense of pity.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    It is three parts The Mighty Boosh to two parts The Goon Show, which, when mixed with the quite astonishing lack of wit and finesse seen here, makes for pure cinematic strychnine.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Parkland
    Oswald’s brother Robert, played by James Badge Dale, is the film’s only rational human being, and Dale makes you wish Landesman had written the entire film from his angle.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    The plot is an incomprehensible tangle of dead ends and recaps.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Grown Ups 2
    So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Erased
    The film’s glib disregard for collateral murder runs to farcical extremes.
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