Vastly overrated, yet still worth watching

Rating: 5/10 (28 August 2005)

This is a film with far greater ambitions than it actually reaches to.
Firstly, with all the slow pace, the multi-character cast, the coincidences, and failed symbolism as the snowflakes fall at the end, it tries to be something like Magnolia, but eventually ends up only as an overcliched and unsuccessful attempt. It lacks lyricism and allegorism of Magnolia. It lacks real plot to convey ideas. It's OK to have more than one or two parallel, equivalent characters in a film, you simply have to make it longer, but you ought to give them something to cling themselves to or they would fail to convince and to induce any sort of passionate feeling towards themselves in viewers. And then we watch a reportage rather than drama.
Secondly, it's supposed to be an anti-bigotry, anti-prejudice and anti-racist movie. Well, I don't know where the logic of vast part of people here has gone but for me this film failed to be like that too. It's more anti-racial than anti-racist, as the matter of fact, while depicting people of almost every race and origin as being awful (at least being awful sometimes - given the circumstances). So everybody has his dark side. I don't like to follow this. That's utterly untrue. Not everybody. And if this movie was supposed to teach us something, suddenly the message is: there's nobody there, no ideal to follow, no perfection you should try to achieve - everybody is corrupted so what if I am corrupted too. Ayn Rand called it "the cult of the moral greyness". So we have one cop who in a span of one day alters himself from molester and humiliator to saving-life hero, and the other cop who from a life-saving hero changes to murderer. What message is it? That really nice and decent people are in fact corrupted - they and we, the audience, only need specific circumstances to realize it. It sucks. That's searching perfection which makes us humane, not giving it up. "Training Day", for example, also showed corruption, incidentally at the same city, but it had at least a character fighting with it. Not giving up, for God's sake. Is it more plausible behavior? Maybe not, but if i'd like to see people behaving plausible and true, have I really go to the cinema to do that? No - that's not the purpose of cinema, that's not the purpose of any art - to duplicate reality. And given specific case of the murder - doesn't it convey yet another failed message? All in all, it proves that prejudice is useful. If the cop had followed the racial scheme not giving a lift, everybody would've been happy in the end. By the way I think its' true. Prejudice is useful. It's the reason it develops in a society. It grows on individual experiences stacked up to a general scheme. But I hardly suppose it was the message, makers of this movie wanted to pass.
I could evaluate on more specific details, but that should be enough. All in all, given today's cinema, it's still a movie worth watching.