Trite Dishonest Garbage That Gets Cheap Laughs Off "Ironic" Racist Jokes and Stereotypes

Rating: 1/10 (6 March 2006)

"Crash" is an awful, terribly contrived film that dumbs down its audience, filled with one dimensional characters that are as clichéd as the film's plot. With a style that desperately tries to approximate the far superior films of "Traffic" and even "Magnolia", "Crash" is notable in the unnaturalness of the storytelling, and how manipulative it is of its audience.
Worse, "Crash" is the ultimate kind of hypocritical film. A film that supposedly decries racism, but uses the platform as the perfect vehicle for indulging in every nasty racial stereotype and racial joke you can imagine.
Middle America is supposed to feel "smarter" watching this film, while laughing out loud at jokes and stereotypes such as Latinos parking their cars on their lawn, blacks guys complaining about treated as criminals, but in turn are car-jackers, and the violent, offensive Arab that behaves unsurprisingly like a terrorist.
****SPOILERS****
The "hero" of the film is a racist white cop that lectures his junior that once he's been on the force for years and having to deal with black criminals, he might become racist himself.
This "heroic" white character earlier in the film has pulled over a black couple, and sexually molests the black woman by sticking his fingers into the woman's vagina, while her husband watches.
We then find out the "source" of his racism is his frustration over his ailing father, and his anger that his father was the "victim" of affirmative action that rewarded "unqualified" blacks with opportunities that should have been given to his dad.
Later in the film, we are shown he is correct in his lecture to his junior partner when the partner kills a black passenger in his car that he wrongly assumes is carrying a gun.
Then the "heroic" white character happens upon a car crash involving the black woman he had sexually molested earlier. She is trapped in an overturned car on fire, and he "heroically" saves her. She not only forgives him, but looks like she's fallen in love with him, ready to let the "heroic" white racist ravage her black body.
So by him performing his job as a cop, he is suddenly shown to not be a "real" racist, but a good person at heart. While his junior partner, who was the "non-racist", turned out to be the real racist killing a black guy whom he mistakenly thought had a gun.
This is the kind of tripe that "Crash" is and expects you to be moved by, as if there is some great underlying truth here.
The worst thing about this movie is that it expects you to take it seriously, and yet the characters and situations are so far removed from reality, it can be argued that "Star Wars" is more plausible.
The movie is also dishonest by purposefully creating endings to situations that are the exact opposite to what the viewer would expect or what has been foreshadowed. It is a gimmick for the filmmakers to try to have the audience believe that they themselves have racist or preconceived notions about the characters based on their race, when in fact, the audience has been purposely mislead in order to set up the "surprise" endings.
It's the same if say a film spends 90 minutes showing a character who kills everyone he meets, but in the final 5 minutes, this character inexplicably changes his whole behavior and refuses to fight, and ends up getting himself killed from his newfound pacifism.
Is the audience truly challenged or "exposed" for their "preconceptions"? In the case of "Crash", absolutely not.
"Crash" is a dishonest, manipulative film that gets cheap laughs off racist jokes and stereotypes, while at the same time, makes "heros" out of its racist characters through contrived "redemption".
The ending with the black-pride carjacker who "saves" the truckload of Asian slaves by releasing them in Chinatown while spewing racial epithets at them wraps up this horrific turkey quite nicely in the absolute most pretentious manner possible.
"Crash" may indeed not just be the worst film of 2005, but the worst film so far of the century.