Not as good as they would have you believe...

Rating: 3/10 (17 April 2006)

**Contains Spoilers** I was intrigued by the first half of this movie. We have a police officer sexually assaulting a black woman, his indignant partner, a pair of carjacking black youths, an Asian man hit by a car, a Persian convenience store owner (how original), and a prosperous white couple who turn out to be rather unsavoury. The movie baits you with these characters, making you wonder what will happen to them and how their behaviour will be repaid.
Then we get to the second half. While the beginning of the movie nicely sets up some scenarios that make us curious, the second half hinges on consequences that are too unbelievable to swallow. The sex offender cops saves the woman he molested. The WASP woman who is "always angry" falls down stairs and must be cared for by her Hispanic maid. The good black policeman purgers himself in order to cover up a warrant out for his brother, who coincidentally is shot to death by the idealistic young cop who stood up for his principles. The poor Asian man, hit by a car, turns out to be trafficking Cambodian nationals for a Triad gang. And the car thief finds the van full of Cambodians, steals it, and ends up setting them free after being offered roughly $5000 for them. Right...
***Spoilers End*** Okay, we get it. Good people do bad things, and bad people do good things. Nice premise, but did we need to be hit over the head with it over and over again? And couldn't the writer find less coincidental means of revealing the moral of the story? Perhaps the writer should have spent less time attempting to write a Pulp Fiction morality tale and more time fleshing out his characters in order to make them more believable and less one-sided. Because in the end, no matter what they do, they can still be described in simplistic terms. Racist. Car Thief. WASP. Idealistic Cop. Family Man. And so on.