Quite Simply Superb

Rating: Null/10 (19 January 2006)

Here Sandra Bullock (headlining, though she actually has precious little to do) redeems herself after the atrocity that was 'Miss Congeniality 2', and Matt Dillon gives his best ever performance. Don Cheadle is, as always, excellent.
I was initially a little put off by Haggis's approach to characterisation, as, in it's first quarter, the script is really an essay on the angst of liberal white America, but as the film develops archetypes and expectations are both successfully reinforced and undermined  a neat trick, if it can be pulled off, which it is here. In one case  the tale of an immigrant shop owner angered into irresponsibly taking up arms - a whole series of cinematic clichés seem to be converging, only for the rug to be pulled out from the audience at the last moment  the consequence of which almost had me in tears.
It's that rarest of Hollywood beasts, an ensemble piece  borrowing a little from the style of Altman's 'Short Cuts' and Anderson's (underrated) 'Magnolia', with story-arcs featuring seemingly unrelated characters having a domino-effect on other tales and characters. It's easy for characterisation to suffer when there's a concerted effort to join-the-dots between plot lines, but for the most part this process is handled with subtlety, and there's not a bad performance in the whole thing.