Sophomoric and Heavy-handed Treatment of Racism

Rating: 1/10 (30 September 2006)

This movie is extremely annoying due to its self-satisfied tone and heavy-handed treatment of racism. The characters don't seem like real people but rather stereotypes constructed with the aim of drilling in the main thesis of the movie, that racism is bad and all people are horrible racists. (And in case you don't get it the first time, this is pointed out again and again in the movie.) The dialogue is exasperating because it comes across as unnatural and lacks any subtlety whatsoever. For example, characters will often launch into preachy, long-winded speeches about their views of race in America during a casual encounter with another character. Characters also have the annoying habit of providing too much information about their personal backgrounds to each other; such self-disclosures ring false because they are tangential to the conversation at hand and seem included mainly to force the viewer into an understanding of the roots of that particular character' s racism. Whatever happened to the notion of show don't tell or allowing viewers to piece together things on their own? The movie is also melodramatic in a bad way, relying heavily on coincidence in order to connect the main characters in the different plot lines. In the end, the movie comes across like the effort of an overly-zealous adolescent who is eager to tackle big issues but lacks the subtlety or maturity to execute it.