So many people recommend Crash to me, and I feel I ought to reoay them by crashing vehciles into them on a repeat basis. With an A-List cast that has less talent than a postage stamp, watching Crash is a painful experience and in no small thanks to a script that is so predictable it’s patronising.

Several characters are intertwined into a story about racism, prejudice and stereotypes. It’s about fear, it’s about being dehumanised. It’s also pretty crap aside from a handful of tense scenes. Think Magnolia crossed with Boyz N The Hood ultra light, but full of sugar. It’s such a bad film I don’t even want to write about it, but I’ll attempt to.

In short, what we have is several characters that are from ethnic backgrounds, and some from white backgrounds. Black characters seem to be crapped upon or suffer at the hands of those that are white. A black man can’t seem to get anywhere without the help of a white person, nor can they do anything unless given permission to do so by their white superiors.

What this film suggests and even demonstrates that nothing has changed since the age of African slavery. They may have better jobs, and better status, but the world they live in is still dominated and dicated by their pale counterparts. The irony is supposed to be that those of a ghost like skin are fearful of those of colour, even though they are the “superior” race. It’s so tactless and stereotypical that it defies belief.

I suppose the argument would be this is how it is in America, this is how people live and what they really think. That may be so, but there is not one single positive character from an ethnic background in this film, with the exception of a hispanic repairman. Aside from that one character, everyone else seems doomed to tragedy, failure or is on the verge of doing something stupid. Crash too easily falls into the trap of trying to present something intelligent about race, and just reminds everyone what they already know. Those of colour will, have and perhaps always will be at the bottom of the status ladder.

Dan Cheadle acts like an action man figure, with little or no expression. Brendan Fraser is dull, Sandra Bullock is actually very good as a bitch, but it’s only the first time I’ve enjoed watching her perform. The rest of the cast from Matt Dillon to Thandie Newton are stereotypes, cliches and unoriginal. Performances vary, but it’s all a bit average.

Visually the film is very glossy, proyced with sheen and obviously had a good few dollars spent on it. Everything has that just made look, brand new, clean, fresh out of the box. For a film trying to offering a gritty plot, it fails to look the part, if you will. Everything looks like it’s been santised, that the set has had the cleaners in just before shooting.

This is no To Kill a Mockingbird, and comes across more as a hash job of ideas thrown together from popular race films and stapled together and delivered as a film. As a whole the performances are uninspiring and lacking, the ethnic characters are generic, industry standard stereotypes that probably come in a box with Japanese instructions, the direction is lazy, lack any cohesion and often feels all over the place. Script wise, it couldn’t be anymore predictiable, it couldn’t be any less original, nor it could it be any worse than what we’re left with.

For some this film may seem powerful, emotional, and speaks volumes about the situation about race. For me it’s the complete opposite, offering nothing new, nothing interesting and little in the way of value for money. This isn’t entertainment, this is a waste of time and complete insult to people’s intelligence. The scene that clearly marks this fact is the moment you see the box of bullets and what type they are. If the writers and director Paul Haggis actually believed the audience were cripples with partial blindness then their reasoning would be sound. In this case, however, it is imply an amateurish piece of garbage with an irritatingly typical Hollywood endning.

The only people I imagine who would like this film are those that don’t often watch films that require thinking. It’s like a training video towards thinking, or perhaps the first step to getting into reading books. Watch this film, and you might even be able to think for yourself, and who knows, possibly read a book. An appalling and embarassing production.

Verdict: An insult to people’s intelligent offering nothing new in direction or story. A complete waste of time