Racial drama tale shoots itself in the foot

Rating: 3/10 (13 June 2006)

From Million Dollar Baby-scriptwritter Paul Haggis comes a heart-touching story about racial tensions in Los Angeles as he takes you to various small stories between characters and how race is an issue, however I don't know if this Los Angeles exists and can't seem to buy some of the most absurd situations and dialog between said «characters». I'll you this when a supposed hard-hitting drama is making you laugh you know there's something wrong. In this movie, we follow the lives of a rich black couple, two cops(one who is an all-out racist and one who seems to be normal on the surface), an Iranian shop-owner, a Spanish locksmith and the DA and his wife,two carjackers(they must be the dumbest carjackers I've ever seen and their code of honor is a strange one). and an Asian couple(though I don't know what are they doing in the movie) in 24 hours they all crash into each other, one way or another. Unless Los Angeles is some really small town, there's no way these same characters meet over and over again, but they do so as the scripts demands. And talk about dialog, must everything the characters say and do relate to race? You end up feeling more irritated then moved, and intrigued if people actually talk like this. The whole movie feels like a lecture on race and with a moral so cheap, you often question the depth of the characters. Sandra Bullock's and Brendan Fraser's performances are bad and some of the stuff the carjackers spit out sound like it's Chappelle's show(expect that Chappelle's show parodies racial situations). The first part of the story is essentially the encounters between the said characters(some of them are quite far-fetched), most of them of course showing racial tensions between minorities and non-minorities. In the second half of the film, everything fixes itself and everybody's happy in the end, sorta of contradicting the setup of the first half of the movie. It tries to be controversial, but it doesn't offer anything we haven't already seen in various others movies, TV series and crime novels. Once again, about the depth of the characters, some of them are just plain strange, I somehow find it hard to believe an African-American chief of police would turn a blind eye regarding the actions of certain cop of his precinct because "it would be a lot of hassle". Hard also to believe that they broke in a shop without taking the gun. Even if the gun had blanks they would still hurt(even though it would be minimal) if shot at that range. The laugh out loud high point of the movie was: when the movie director who's wife was molested by the cop earlier, he didn't do anything then because he was afraid to get shot by the police(yes, the people who enforce the laws and protect citizens, those police officers), decides to stand up for himself and punch out those two carjackers he never met who attempt to rob his SUV at !gunpoint!(yes, carjackers, criminals who rob cars) and when the police arrive, he doesn't turn the carjackers in, oh and he shouts at police too. It'll make you laugh, but it will ultimately leave you preoccupied with the message it conveys. Said carjackers then split up after that failed robbery, they never look for one another again. These are some of the absurd plot-points you will witness in the film. Better save your money on the DVD and rent American History X.