 Paul Haggis, the screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby, makes his directorial debut in Crash, which he also wrote, and which stars, among others, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Ludacris, and Brendan Fraser. The effort is receiving mixed reviews. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily Newswrites, "It's good to see a movie that views its characters as mixed bags instead of merely saints or sinners. And there's some very fine acting on display. Crash wants to be taken seriously as a meditation on our anxiety-plagued times, but the coincidences are too pat, the tugs on the heartstrings too insistent." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post also reveals some mixed feelings about the film: "This ambitious directing debut ... is uneven and its interlocking stories rely heavily on coincidence, but the acting is uniformly fine and there are some stunning sequences." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe describes the film as "one of those multi-character, something-is-rotten-in-Los Angeles barnburners that grab you by the lapels and try desperately to shake you up." However, he adds, "its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do." But Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises the film as a "literate, engrossing and occasionally funny look at race relations in Los Angeles" and says it's "blessed with a splendid cast and a smart script." And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times praises it as "a movie of intense fascination." He adds: "Because we care about the characters, the movie is uncanny in its ability to rope us in and get us involved." Finally, Ebert concludes: "Not many films have the possibility of making their audiences better people. I don't expect Crash to work any miracles, but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves." |
