Crash it does...

Rating: 3/10 (24 September 2006)

There is a real tragedy about this film. No, I'm not talking about the issue of racism in America (or anywhere) which this film feebly tries to address, but rather how a good idea for a movie and an impressive cast were wasted on this overcooked turkey.
This film veers into overkill within the first few lines (Don Cheadle's hideously contrived little monologue about LA) and just keeps going. Haggis has taken the most delicate and sensitive subject in the New American consciousness and slapped his audience across the face with it for two hours. If Haggis had engraved the word "racism" onto a five inch nail and hammered it into my skull, it would've been more subtle and less painful than sitting through this film. If it weren't bad enough that he puts his characters in some highly implausible situations (some of which are handled very well from a technical perspective, I must admit) throughout the film, it certainly nails the coffin of believable film-making shut that every single person in this movie is racist to the point where they don't seem to talk about anything else. Every character here seems to have the same dilemma – that their life is wrought with racism and prejudice – but the reasons behind this are never explored. All the characters here are "connected" in such a contrived way, one has to wonder if any thought went into it. Beyond this, we are given no reason to try and like or relate to anybody we're introduced to, and the dialogue is so relentlessly obvious and didactic that it almost sounds like it came out of a high school improvised-drama class. Take note, Mr Haggis, we are not as stupid as you seem to think we are.
Because of this, every character soon becomes entirely two dimensional as their prejudice/anger/misery is spelled out for us in almost monosyllabic terms. Presumably the point, not that it could be missed, is that we are all a little racist. Haggis aims to show us this by having all of his characters talk more shamelessly about their views than even the most bigoted people I have ever known. What this film seems utterly devoid of is subtlety. It is subtlety which would have made the story much more realistic, powerful, significant and enjoyable to those of us with more than sub-human emotional intelligence and, by extension, much less insulting to that same fraction of the audience.
The casting is superb and the acting is good (though far from being anybody's best work), but even a group of actors as fine as this couldn't have grounded such fantastically over-the-top characters. Mark Isham's horribly contrived Zimmeresque score does nothing to detract from the brazen theatrics of Haggis' direction either.
In short, this is a grossly overrated, almost child-like fable of urban discontent that aims far higher than it ever reaches and is nowhere near as clever or important as it thinks it is. It would have been far more interesting and far more validating if there was any interest here in trying to understand the cause of racism, but that's not Haggis' agenda. Presumably, the point of this tripe was to highlight something that should need no highlighting to (white, middle class) people who are basically ignorant about it or consider it a myth perpetrated by overtly liberal media or minorities who have a chip of their shoulder.
In other words, this is a movie made BY white people who have no realistic concept of what racism means from the other side (and why should they?) FOR white people who have no realistic concept of what racism means from the other side. If you are one of those people (and you probably don't know it if you are), you might enjoy this pretentious, self indulgent, steaming pile. If you have a modicum of common sense, a hint of social consciousness or the capacity to think for yourself in any way, you're better off looking for a copy of 'White Dog', 'Nothing But a Man', 'Shadows', 'Do The Right Thing' or any number of superior films that address the issue of racism with far more taste, intelligence and subtlety.