This movie was complete junk.

Rating: 1/10 (14 November 2005)

The film opens with two young black guys who are walking down the street and remarking about how America stereotypes them as criminals and how unfair it is that the world operates that way but just as you are starting to see their point of view they steal an SUV at gunpoint. So now you think the whole speech was satire and if Haggis had written it that way I might have enjoyed the movie a slight bit but instead he manages to make their feelings a constant righteous theme and they are portrayed as the victims.
Matt Dillon is, of course, a racist L.A. cop who dabbles in rape- cause all cops are like that, right? And it's important for Hollywood to perpetuate this image for some reason. Dillon's character has a rookie partner who is not a racist at the start but rather an idealist who doesn't want to be a racist but finds that he cant fight his inherent white programming and, in a bigoted misunderstanding, shoots a black hitchhiker (who is actually the gun-toting carjacker- or "victim of oppressive white America" and the kid brother of Don Cheadles character).
Fraser plays the idiotic DA whose character apparently just learned black people were on the planet and asks stupid questions to his adviser referring to them as "those people"; Bullock is a pill-popping débutante who lords over her Mexican servants like a slave owner and plays the racist to the locksmith who can't understand her fear even though he is dressed and tattooed like a prison inmate and she just got robbed at gunpoint. Of course she still isn't meant to have any sympathy felt for her because she's apparently evil and deserved it, as the movie later reminds you when a fall down the stairs teaches her that racism is wrong. (Huh? You gotta be kidding me, people paid to see this tripe?)
The only other white people in the movie are bumbling, heartless cops and a gun store owner who is (of course) a faucet of racist epitaphs. The last character of note is the gun-mad Arab store owner who is stereotypically nuts and tries to shoot the Mexican locksmith for no other reason than Haggis needed to further vilify another race du jour and with the war going on why not pick the Arabs?
Now, at this point you are wondering who the hero of the movie is. It could be the black Hollywood director who gets pulled over and his wife raped by the racist LAPD or the black HMO representative who gets to enjoy her revenge on all white people by making the Dillon characters father suffer at the hands of prostate cancer- she is also made to be vindicated by the mood of the movie.
I expected better by producer Don Cheadle, a representative of Hollywood I had great respect for but am not surprised by Haggis' inability to capitalize on an opportunity to succeed with a well assembled cast. That is his signature.
My Final Verdict: Don't watch this movie, don't rent it, don't use it to prop your window open. Its crash all right- crash and burn.