A slow progression downwards.

Rating: 1/10 (1 May 2006)

I must say that "Crash" left me a bit confused, not because I found it difficult to understand or hard to accept, but because it fooled me. It fooled me into liking it for all the wrong reasons. After hearing rave reviews from many people whose opinions I greatly respect, I decided to watch it and see for myself.
There are movies that get better every time you watch them, like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe," and then there are movies like "Crash" which sink lower and lower, until you wonder how anybody could ever enjoy such a movie. My main objection to this movie is that it sets itself up as the true and gritty face of modern racism, but cops out and settles for ease and audience appeal rather than gutsy decision-making. I found the dialogue to be woefully written and poorly used throughout the movie. I read a review which called the dialogue "bumper sticker quotes" and I couldn't agree more. "Crash" tries to be realistic and striking but the dialogue makes it cliché and pedantic. It talks down to the viewer and takes a moral high-ground which it cannot support.
After thinking more about the movie, and questioning my initial positive reaction, I realized that the movie only appeals to human vanity. One leaves the movie feeling they have gone through an emotional journey, but they ultimately feel good about themselves. The fact that a movie which purports deal with cross-spectrum racism refuses to make the viewer question their own secret bigotries makes it a terrible failure in my mind. I say so because it had the potential to be so much more; "Crash" could have been better, and it could have actually deserved the Oscar, had it not gone for the safe Hollywood ending. When tackling a subject such as racism, it feels like an artistic let-down to leave the theatre feeling good.
I don't think movies should be judged against other movies, that just leaves too much room for subjective argument. When deciding if a movie is good or not, one has to compare what the movie accomplishes against what the movies tries to do. For it's shameless appeal to happy endings, it's insultingly preachy dialogue, and it's tendency to say everything while expressing nothing at all, "Crash" fails in the worst way a movie can. It is nothing but a bland pat-on-the-back, and we can now turn away from the issue of racism because "Crash" thinks it has solved it for us.
I once counted myself among those duped by "Crash," but I hope that with time and contemplation, more people come to see how superficial and uninspiring this movie really is.