Touching moments, but felt contrived.

Rating: 7/10 (19 September 2005)

As a dramatic movie it certainly has done its job. There is a wide range of highly emotional themes throughout the movie.
For example: 1) The Matt Dillon officer who sexually assaults a black man's wife in front of her husband and threatening to charge and arrest the couple with driving offenses on a traffic stop arising from his own personal frustrations, and is then subsequently forced to rescue her when she is upside down on a car in another scene.
2) The little girl jumping in to rescue his father by a mad Persian store owner that was going to kill him, and the shot firing, and nothing happening.
3) The supposedly 'good' morally upright cop that end up killing the black hitchhiker out of his own paranoia.
4) The Asian guy that got run over by the two Black people had a van full of girls or children that would have been sold as sex slaves. You feel sorry for the Asian guy, until you find out he is a woman-stealer, then you feel good he got hit real good with the stolen van, since that is what he did with the lives of the people in the van. Shows you cant feel sorry for people all the time when bad things happen.
The 'heightened' tense scenes were emotionally involving and rather convincing.
However, there is a sense of phoniness about the movie - that is for the most part contrived and not real (but then again it is not meant to be a documentary so what do you expect - it's a drama). Again, the actors are all well paid to represent problems that happen in poorer and violent communities they would not live in themselves, the director/writer is in their Ivory tower making money out of real problems they probably did not experience themselves, except the car crash.