A pretentious little montage of contrived melodramas.

Rating: 3/10 (8 March 2006)

How this pretentious little montage of contrived melodramas ever pulled off a Best Picture Oscar is positively beyond me, particularly considering the infinitely superior films there were to choose from. Credit, or perhaps blame, must be given to writer Paul Haggis, who also wrote Million Dollar Baby, and from whom we might have expected more. Instead, Haggis reaches into a bag of vapid tricks honed through decades of writing pap for the small screen and assembles what is basically an excruciatingly long episode of one of his dreary television soap operas. This is clearly a writer's indulgence; mental masturbation without a shred of human insight.
The performances are game, and not even Robert Altman could have assembled a more impressive pile of talent to pump something into nothing. In the end, Crash has all the subtlety of an Oliver Stone movie, which is to say, none. Thank you Mr. Haggis for this facile diatribe that inartfully delivers nothing more than the painfully obvious; prejudice is bad.