In Los Angeles, there are many exciting events happening there. That story began with police inspector Graham Waters. Graham He and his colleague as well as his mistress were charged with investigating a powerful murder in an area. With the continuing research by Graham and the congregation, Graham meets a Korean woman, both of whom begin a series of secrets and problems that change their lives.
Haggis 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.
Ultimately, Crash succeeds in spite of itself. Its color war starts to feel obvious and schematic. Its coincidences and cliches become like a pileup on the 405 freeway, but there it is -- you find yourself rubbernecking and can't manage to look away.
Instead of heartwarming messages about forgiveness, it honours ambiguity and brings us close, closer than is comfortable, in fact, to what Americans today are really thinking about one another.
Haggis shows a lot of promise as a director: his film is never dull. But he needs to unlearn some of the bad lessons he picked up working in TV, which demands that everything be neat, symmetrical and underlined.
It's smart, therefore, that Haggis has written such novel, precisely observed, often unpleasant characters as the ones Bullock, Dillon, and Cheadle inhabit.
CinePassion
February 23, 2015
The dramatic tidiness of Crash dovetails the soap operatic strands into a facile contemporary j'accuse without ever addressing how race plays into the ideologies that enforce an oppressive order.
[Haggis] makes his directing debut with a screenplay that often seems rigged and contrived, but comes to life via excellent acting and a philosophical argument that bigotry and benevolence are inextricably intertwined.
[Crash] is familiar enough that it slips easily into our film-watching faculty without any fuss, yet [Haggis'] handling of it -- his muscular belief in what he is doing -- makes us hope that his next screenplay will be a bit less safe.