Great ingredients, but nobody mixed the batter.

Rating: 5/10 (19 July 2005)

When you bake a cake, you put all the ingredients into a mixing bowl, mix them all together, and then bake it. If you just have the ingredients and never actually mix them together before baking though, you're not getting a cake. 'Crash', to me, feels like just that; great ingredients, but nobody mixed the batter.
'Crash' has all the elements of a great movie. Great cast, great acting, great dialogue, believable characters and motivations, impressive cinematography, and a good director. But it just didn't quite 'gel' with me. It seemed like it was just a series of vignettes with barely developed characters and story lines, with a bunch of racist overtones to speak a message that's never quite clear.
Most of the characters were stereotypes themselves, nobody *really* redeemed themselves even though the stories made it seem like many of them did, there was never any closure in the majority of the stories, and everything was just a bit too coincidental to seem as realistic as the movie was supposed to be. All of the characters would show up again to affect another character in the story, which would then affect another character. For a movie that's supposed to portray gritty realism, I certainly found myself thinking "What an unlikely coincidence" very often whenever a character would show up again later on for a dramatic third-act plot twist.
I think a TV series with maybe one character's back story focused on per episode (for example, the same format as ABC's "Lost") would've worked better. But there really was never a full, coherent story in this movie, nor was there ever a clear message. It just seemed like they wanted to pack way too much into two hours, and for me, it fell a little flat.
Definitely worth seeing for the fantastic performances (I never knew 'Ludacris' could act, Don Cheadle is excellent, and even Ryan Phillipe surprised me). But to me, it's a movie with a near-perfect body, but no real soul.