Pretty bad

Rating: 1/10 (2 January 2008)

This was a pretty bad film. To be fair, I thought it was better than the one-star rating I gave it here, but I felt morally compelled to vote it thusly just to counter-balance the staggeringly incomprehensible positive votes that it received. That this mess won Best Picture is horrific.
Indeed, its winning of Best Picture was the only reason I saw it. I had low expectations going in, expecting it to be heavy-handed and preachy; perhaps for this reason I wasn't so offended by its copious heavy-handed preachiness. It managed to hold my attention for the most part. But there is an awful lot to throw darts at here. I will confine myself to what I consider the most egregious problem, which was the contrived nature of the whole thing.
In a nutshell, most of the characters just flat-out don't work. That is to say, the end up doing or saying things that make NO SENSE within the context of what we already know about the character. This is because the relentless point-of-view of this film is supposed to be that EVERYBODY is both good and bad, so that every racist character has to be shown to have a good side, and every good character has to be shown to have a racist side. But with dogged determination to shove every character through this cookie-cutter, very little effort is expended to actually *develop* the characters in such a way as to make both sides of them seem credible. So we get such out-of-the-blue nonsense as having the otherwise-perfectly-unracist detective spout a bit of anti-Hispanic bigotry at the woman he's sleeping with-- with nothing before or after to make that make sense. Same with the "good cop" guy, who has very consistently shown to abhor racism and be a good guy-- until suddenly he gets all worked up over nothing and shoots the black guy for nothing. And it works the other way. The bitchy racist DA's wife, in the end *preposterously* decides that the Hispanic maid is actually her best friend??? With *hugs*?? You don't even get the sense that she hugs her *husband* with that much affection. How did *that* fit the character??? The answer, in all cases, is that it DOESN'T fit the character; the movie makers simply felt that all they had to do to show that even good people are racists is to show us good people and then have them, for no reason, act racist for a little while. It's like trying to prove a point by simply asserting it over and over again, rather than bringing in any logic or facts to the argument. I could make a great film demonstrating how, really, EVERYBODY likes strawberry ice cream, by simply showing a lot of people eating and enjoying strawberry ice cream-- even those who claim they don't like strawberry ice cream. But that would hardly convince anyone of my premise, would it?