An Unrelenting Parade of Ironies

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2005)

CRASH (2 outta 5 stars) I was really expecting to like this movie... there is a lot of great acting in it and some provocative dialogue and I generally love ensemble-type movies like this. So why did this movie irk me so much by the time it was all over? Maybe it was the piling on of one contrived coincidence after another. After a while I was not having the "oh-wow" reaction that was surely intended... but more like "oh-good-grief". Plus the unrelenting parade of ironies wore out its welcome after the first thirty minutes. Okay, fine, we get it... people are not "good" or "bad" but they all have *both* goodness and badness in them... you can stop hammering that point home now! After awhile it just started to ring false... like we were no longer eavesdropping on real-life situations but viewing the work of a biased sociologist who is manipulating the facts to support his thesis. So many scenes just didn't seem very realistic: the Persian man grabbing the gun and going after the locksmith, Ryan Philippe's overwrought reaction to a hitchhiker, even Sandra Bullock's sudden realization of who her "real friend" is seemed false. (Aside: we really didn't need to have Sandra's character come out and SAY that her housekeeper was the best friend she's got... the weepy eyes and the the hug was enough, okay? A little more subtlety at times like this would have definitely helped the movie.) And have I mentioned the music yet? Oh please, please, please, make it STOP! That pretentious "angelic" score just kept grating on my nerves the more I heard it. The movie is not all bad. Ludicrous's character steals the movie... personally I think they should have just followed him and Larenz Tate around for 2 hours and ejected some of those other subplots. The bedtime scene with the locksmith and his little girl was very sweet and touching in itself but I felt it was enormously cheapened by the later confrontation with the shopkeeper... it was no longer a scene about the characters but merely a "set-up" for a (contrived) "pay-off".