Vault Reviews: Crash (2004)

This film won best picture? I honestly fail to see how.

This film baffles me. I cannot understand why the academy bestowed such a high honour to a film as ham-fisted, poorly written and pretentious as this. The academy is by no means flawless in it's decision making, however this is a confusingly ill-judged misstep.

This film opens with meaningless and self important drivel that means nothing in the grand scheme. It serves only to shoehorn the title into an important sounding piece of dialogue. The audience is then victim to around 20 minutes of hammered in rambling concerning racism. This dialogue is painfully obvious and predictable, and the scenes themselves seem determined to reinforce the stereotypes they present rather than debunk them. For example, a scene consisting of a young black man talking about the smaller aspects of racism (fine), and lamenting popular stereotypes (fine). The scene then ends with the man and his brother then mugging a white couple and stealing their car. I fail to see what this scene was meant to convey. 

The film then continues to awkwardly defend racist acts, such as an experienced cop who attributes racism to his sick father and negative experience with black criminals. This cop is seen sexually assaulting a black woman and harassing her present husband, however he is redeemed by saving her from a car latter. The film has therefore ended its argument without saying anything of note. Wasting the audiences time. Crash attempts to showcase how numerous ethnicities can be guilty of racist acts themselves, however it fails to do this convincingly. The fact that every character in the film shows racist characteristics kills all sense of reality the film has. I am not racist, my friends are not, and I know few people who are, this is true of many people in our progressive and accepting society . The film however creates a hyper- reality in which everybody is actively prejudiced, and yet presents a story that is meant to be taken as a portrayal of reality. This therefore fails to reflect reality in any way, further weakening the message. 

The films acting is serviceable. Don Cheadle is solid and so are a few others, however there are many weak links and flat performances. Fraiser and "Ludacris" are the worst offenders here. However the flaccid and moronic script kills some otherwise OK performances, as the characters are made to behave like ultra racist aliens rather than typical LA citizens. 

So what is good? The cinematography is very nice, honestly deserves a much better film. And that's about it. I will end this review here, as it is becoming as long winded and irrelevant as the film itself. I will leave you with this: Crash honestly claims that buses have large windows because of racism. If this line was meant to be ironic or something, the film gave me no indication of this and I find it unlikely in context.

Originally posted 25/6/14 on IMDB.com