Crash Reviews
Top CriticHaggis moves seamlessly between all these stories and has structured them in such a way that his characters reach a crisis point simultaneously, followed by melancholy clarity.
It's smart, therefore, that Haggis has written such novel, precisely observed, often unpleasant characters as the ones Bullock, Dillon, and Cheadle inhabit.
Enjoy the wonderful performances by a cast very committed to the cause.
An already over-eventful narrative -- what, another crash? -- teeters into melodramatic implausibility.
[Has a] spirited and talented ensemble cast, which Haggis directs with sensitivity.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Haggis's drama is about much more than interlocking front-end collisions. It's about the way we learn, often badly, about one another and how it may take a bad confrontation to peel away the misperceptions.
This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting. It asks tough questions, and lets its audience struggle with the answers.
The best parts of Crash are as good as they are because they confront us with behaviour we might be capable of under the same circumstances. And we're not bad people. Are we?
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| Original Score: 3/4
And so Crash raises the question: If racism is so pervasive in our society, why do we need such an elaborately contrived plot to drive home the message? In other words: How many racists does it take to screw in the point?
Crash, Paul Haggis' flawed but riveting tale of racism in contemporary Los Angeles, has moments so powerful they're instantly seared into your memory; you'll watch without blinking, barely breathing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Its emotional lows and wicked below-the-belt punches make it a soul-searching film, a manipulative movie with a lot of stars and a writer-director staying on message throughout: We need to know each other better than this.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Crash isn't set half-a-century ago, in some place of dusty roads and Skoal-spitting sheriffs. It takes place now, in Los Angeles, that most modern of American cities.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Contrived, obvious and overstated, Crash is basically just one white man's righteous attempt to make other white people feel as if they've confronted the problem of racism head-on.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
An ambitious and often wonderful movie, an expansive look at urban life -- the fractious, noisy whole of it -- filled with witty, biting and insightful writing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Haggis bends back one full day to unravel the tangled threads leading to the crash, and, in turn, the tangle justifies the existence of his varied and polyglot ensemble.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
One of the finest American movies to engage our diverse richness and our casual and not-so-casual ethnic hostility.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The characters and individual dramas remain interesting in a personal way, but the overall conception of Crash is hackneyed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The theme is racism. Let me say that again: The theme is racism. I could say it 500 more times because that's how many times the movie says it, in every single scene.
Cheadle serves as the movie's Greek chorus, sorting out the fender benders that serve as a metaphor for a city where, Haggis implies, racial profiling rivals moviemaking as a leading activity.
| Original Score: 3/4
What emerges from the movie's emotional fender-bending and concentrated irony are moments of awe-inspiring reach, the kind of full-throttle acting that demands attention.
| Original Score: B
You will watch much of Crash in dread. That's not so much because you know things are going to get worse -- they do -- before they get better, but because you know Haggis is getting to the nut of things.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Audiences may cringe as Haggis taps into the kind of offensive images that surreptitiously seep into the brains of even the most open-minded. His point is simple: No one is immune.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A grim, histrionic experiment in vehicular metaphor slaughter.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Lop off a few characters, tighten the narrative geometry, and Crash might have a sledgehammer impact. As it is, the film is content to tap you on the shoulder and ask you to take a look around.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Americans from radically different backgrounds are brought together by a grim serendipity in Paul Haggis's frustrating directorial debut.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Haggis challenges our common conceptions about race and allows no character to escape his own hypocrisy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Like that nerve-rattling collision of metal and glass, Crash will leave its audiences jarred awake, feeling bruised.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Crash has been crafted to deliver a wake-up blow to our complacency.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A gorgeous mosaic of a movie that is actually about our fears of each other, set in the bright light of Los Angeles and the dark places in our hearts.
| Original Score: 4/4
Dark, fluid thriller seasoned with acerbic dialogue and rueful observations that may strike uncomfortably close to home.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
An intricate, explosive ensemble crime drama set in a modern urban pressure-cooker of racial and class hatreds.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
People collide as well in this literate, engrossing and occasionally funny look at race relations in Los Angeles.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with Collateral, one of the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period.
Despite its preachy moments, the film is a knockout. In a multiplex starved for ambition, why kick a film with an excess of it?
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Haggis knows how to grab the viewer's attention, via intense confrontations as well as by planting dramatic seeds that bear fruit in, more often than not, grimly unexpected ways.
The stunning, must-see drama Crash is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock in our anesthetized society.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.
Crash's strength is that it deals intelligently with serious subjects.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.
I think this is the kind of film that starts arguments and stimulates passionate discussion about topics that still make most of us cringe.
