A near miss

Rating: 7/10 (14 January 2006)

Haggis' directorial debut is a powerful and thought provoking look at a slice of LA life. In some ways, with its multi strands, it reminded me of some of Altman's "Nashville". The film successfully pulls all the strands together to make some pertinent points about different races fearing and misunderstanding each other without resorting to platitude too much.
On the flip side I found it schematic, too reliant on coincidence and frequently implausible (it would seem that there are only 5 cops including Officers Dillon and Phillipe in the whole of LAPD). At some points the film begins to bow under the weight of its own ambition - I would usually say that is a good thing, but here I felt that less incident would have given the characters more space to breath and come alive for the viewer. At times I felt that the characters moved from interesting 3D portrayals to screenwriters mouthpiece and this distanced me from an otherwise powerful film We need intelligent and provocative cinema and, in many ways, Crash delivers but I still think that it has been overrated by an audience desperate for something more than the usual popcorn fare