Deception

Rating: 1/10 (19 August 2009)

Zero Stars (out of 4) By Aaron Dumont
Among the countless slew and turgid veil of the garishly safe, self-satisfied PC-indulgence fests released within the past years, Crash, a monstrous, clunky culmination of the very, very worst of Altman-wannabes and the most tired and bored of overused conventions, stood among the most confoundingly successful of them all.
In Paul Haggis' Crash, an array of characters live in Los Angeles. Their lives intersect with each other, and they go through an unbearably straightforward series of melodramatic incidents, mainly due to a car crash. The movie as a whole is executed in a pretend-mythical style—astoundingly overused, absurdly glossy spiritual symbols, artificial, indulgent melodramatics instead of genuine humanity and insight. The characters are portrayed as either victimized angels or bigoted demons that repent to become victimized angels.
The movie itself is so clean, manufactured and mass-produced that it feels like a plastic shell. The characters are nothing more than pop abstractions that begin with little-to-none dimension and, paradoxically, lose dimension as they progress. The social and cultural tidbits portrayed here are illustrated in straight, bold, plain lines. Crash's formality feels so out-of-place, so uncomfortable, that even with any redeeming values, it's impossible to forgive.
Now, technically speaking, it's not the worst movie ever made, and it's not the worst of the decade, either. In fact, based on technical guidelines, it's not even the worst movie of 2005. However, in applying the Joe Queenan theory-—that the truly worst movies ever made are the ones that shot for the moon and offshooted; the movies that bugged you; the ones that stuck with you for a long, long time - Crash is really the worst of its year. It is also one of the worst of the decade (only The Village, The Passion of the Christ, Hancock and a few others fare worse). It's wildly visionary approach simply felt like a mammoth-scale failure. It got to me. It bugged me. The whimper this movie got out of such a fruitful idea was simply sad to watch. Any faint merits or respectable attempts for greatness made it seem all the more heartbreakingly terrible—this pretentious, cheap disaster seems so wasted.
The movie is a deformed pastiche of political blindness, soullessness and emptiness. It appeared to me as a lifeless, rushed scam - a movie that feeds off mass consensus of opinion without trying anything revolutionary itself.
Crash is a movie that gives itself the undeserved assertion that it really is revolutionary-—yet it pathetically follows the crowd while it obnoxiously assumes it is leading. This movie could have been so much more—something modest, something in-touch, something relevant--or, at the very least, something tolerable.