Vastly Overrated

Rating: 3/10 (9 June 2005)

I was prepared to like this movie. Critics hailed the film as a modern morality play, a commentary on the rank bigotry with which many of us confront the increasing ethnic diversity of our culture. I expected to be challenged, even provoked. Instead, I found myself wondering which movie the critics reviewed. "Crash" is a sophomoric, unrelentingly bleak pageant of disjointed and improbable character sketches. The writing is melodramatic and often illogical, and the characters are surprisingly one-dimensional and unsympathetic, with one notable exception. The film-makers certainly succeeded in demonstrating that no one is above racial and ethnic prejudice. In fact, the audience is bludgeoned repeatedly with this truism. African-Americans, whites, Iranians, and Asians appear to have reached a rather perverse equality: they hate each other equally and are equally capable of brutish behavior. Only a Hispanic character, played with warmth and tenderness by Michael Pena, manages to escape with a semblance of humanity. Most annoying, the entire movie rests on the unlikely premise that in a metropolis the size of Los Angeles characters who were previously unacquainted would encounter each other repeatedly, allowing the writers to tie all of the subplots together in one neat bow. What should have been a sterling cast is simply wasted. Even the great Don Cheadle is reduced to operatic posturing and is forced to deliver lines that are truly ridiculous. What man of any color would tell his mother in such stark terms that he was "indisposed" when she called? How could he have been so clueless as to the ethnicity of his paramour? Cheadle wasn't the only victim of the writers' incompetence. Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton, and Terrence Howard make valiant efforts to breathe life into a lifeless script, but they are doomed to failure. Ludicrous and Larenz Tate manage a mildly comic turn while engaging in the only interesting dialogue in the film. I have no idea why Brendan Fraser or Tony Danza were in the movie at all. Not since Sean Penn's disastrous "The Crossing Guard" have writers and a director done so little with so much!