Crash: Blu-ray disc DVD Review

(Originally published May 6, 2005)

Is there a more well-meaning group than those who came together to make the new Paul Haggis melodrama, “Crash”? Maybe--but let’s not encourage them or their guilt.

The film, which Haggis co-wrote with Bobby Moresco, is a misguided, heavy-handed message movie about the current state of race relations in Los Angeles. That’s an important subject to explore--and let’s hope someone with the proper approach tries again soon--but not like this. This is schlock.

Without a trace of subtlety, Haggis (screenwriter of “Million Dollar Baby”) tackles the race issue by employing a cloying web of coincidences and stereotypes that leave his film choking on its own good intentions.

Broadly and simply--and never with the insight of a director like Spike Lee, for instance, or John Singleton when he’s good--Haggis uses his impressive cast to flesh out a story whose rage is manufactured and whose script feels as if it’s keeping it real by letting loose with an endless string of racial epithets. The idea is that if you say the N word often enough, that’ll shake audiences in their seats.

Please. Maybe it would have if the movie hadn’t obviously existed to manipulate its audience, but that’s exactly what it does. Worse, Haggis’ script can’t support the stretch it takes to sustain those manipulations. It just snaps, taking the film down with it.

In the movie, nearly a dozen characters keep colliding in Los Angeles as if the city were restricted to one neighborhood, one street, one corner. There are 10 million people in L.A., most of whom likely will never see each other even once, but in this film, characters from all cross-sections of life just keep crashing into each other in the most ugly of ways.

For instance, there’s mean, wealthy Jean (Sandra Bullock), the unhappy housewife of the city’s equally tense district attorney (Brendan Fraser), who refuses to announce their SUV was stolen at gunpoint by angry two black men (Chris Bridges, Larenz Tate) because it might cost him the black vote.

Meanwhile, Jean treats her Mexican housekeeper with utter contempt while she believes that her Latino locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena), is a gang banger who might sell their new house key to thugs. Her “proof” of this is that Daniel sports a few prison tattoos. And so, in a fit of rage, she demands that her house be fitted with new locks the moment Daniel changes them.

There’s more--lots more, too much more to include here--but in short, there’s Ryan (Matt Dillon), the racist cop who sexually assaults the wife of a black man (Terrence Howard) while his naïve partner, Hanson (Ryan Philippe) looks on in horror. There’s Farjad (Shaun Toub), an Iranian shopkeeper with anger management issues who is certain that Daniel, the aforementioned locksmith, also is out to screw him, which is why Farjad buys a gun. And there’s Don Cheadle as Graham, a black detective whose life is complicated by the love affair with his Latina partner and whose own mother is a drug user desperate to save her other son--you know, the black man who stole the SUV at the film’s start.

Along the way, Asians are run over by trucks and forgotten. Chinese women launch into fights with black women and lose. And then we’re hit with redemption. By the end, Haggis flips everything on its side and offers us wholly opposing views of these people--hey, some whites, blacks, Latinos, Iranians and Asians aren’t so bad after all!--but it all amounts to zip onscreen and the emotional wreckage, forced from the getgo, is ghastly to behold.

Grade: D