Crash

Rating: 7/10 (15 May 2005)

Crash, is about the lives of several people who deal with racism in some way shape or form in their everyday lives. Crash, has good direction, a good script, good performances from everybody involved, good original music and good cinematography. There were many things I liked about Crash, and then some things I did not like about it. The film deals with racism and that is the main theme of the movie but the director focuses on it so much that after awhile it feels like he is trying to teach a lesson on it and makes us his students watching an educational film on racism. I thought it went a little overboard and after awhile it felt like the movie was nothing more than a film trying to show us what is right and what is wrong and how miserable these people are because of it. The film also gives us a moral ending that maybe we will be all better if we change our ways and are not racist. The film also felt like sometimes it wanted to shock us with these racist characters and situations just for the sake of shocking us and make the world a better place and get it's morals across but at the end the film doesn't have much to say other than do this because it is right and don't do that because it is wrong. And near the end of the movie I felt like the director was trying so hard to make us care about these characters and identify with them that it almost got a little sappy. It's like he wanted us to cry or feel depressed just to get this message across but it doesn't work. At least for me it didn't. The film is also jumbled and doesn't deal with having so many characters in one film too well and during the second half of the movie it started to get slower and felt like it dragged at times. The film started out good and it has some good scenes and is interesting for the most part and has good performances but ultimately I found the movie too preachy about it's message and the film is so concerned with it's message that it does little else with the film. I still enjoyed the film enough with it's performances and involving first half but because of this relentless preaching and the jumbled plot of the film I don't think it is the masterpiece critics are making it out to be.