More Clichéd and Dogmatic than Eisenstein... Wow...

Rating: 1/10 (30 September 2005)

If I didn't already have a bleak outlook on the future of humanity, the masses of rave reviews on IMDb might be accompanied by a sense of betrayal; but no. Since there will always be stupid people (something like 19,000 of them) mistaking overwrought emotional pablum for art, movies like Crash will continue to survive as the freshest and edgiest of the mainstream made palatable for the masses.
Palatable... If only.
Granted, if you manage to look past the conflicted and confused directing, the attempts at a heart-rending and not-so-subtly ironic world music score and the over-acted and uninspiring performances that almost did justice to a script so clichéd and self-righteous it made Eisenstein seem like a pretty reasonable chap, you'd notice the best point of the film: the colour is done quite well. Not the composition of each shot, mind you, but the stock that Haggis uses shows soft blues and hypnotic reds that far outdo the soft-focus artism of the actual movie. This, and the fact that the sounds of dry-heaving block out many of the most painful tracts of dialog, granted it its one star.
For everyone giving this movie a gazillion stars and eighteen thumbs up, please go back to listening to Dashboard Confessional (no pun intended) and stick to what you know.