Poorly written race bating

Rating: 4/10 (28 May 2020)

Subtile a sledge hammer in the face, trying to hammer in a message in the head of its audience in this way makes the movie come off as a lesson given by a highly arrogant professor instead of letting the audience find the meaning go the movie themselves .
The dialogue is terrible, there is not one person on the planet who talks like the characters in the movie.
The editing is basic and unspecial except in more difficult scenes that require more advanced editing. There it is either competent or lousy.
A product of Hollywood to show how woke they are by providing an incredibly simplistic picture of racism that lacks nuance and falls flat.
All the characters are like a caricature of real people and cannot be taken seriously and that is the script's fault. The acting is ok without being fantastic which is admirable considering what the actors have to work with.
In one scene at the beginning of the third act, Terrence Howard's character is confronted by a police officer played by Ryan Phillippe, this scene is actually effective. The acting and editing actually work to create an intense scene that gives a sense of genuine consequence. The scene is also helped by the fact that the characters that's involved are 2 of the film's very few relatable characters (which is pretty weird in an ensemble film with many of Hollywood's biggest names).
However, the scene that follows causes one to quickly forget the short sequence of competent filmmaking as the movie tries to force the audience into an emotional response by pushing us into a scene that is completely unmotivated where a child's life is endangered. An incredibly cheap trick to get the audience to feel some kind of intensity as the scene, as I said, has no place, structure or consequence.
The third act is too long, Haggis tries to weave together each character's individual archs accompanied by a manipulative soundtrack that tries to show how all racists, gang members and victims actually have more in common than what one thinks but by this time I am so incredibly checked out that I'm just longing for the subtitles.