Most critics like it, and the praise lands in the same two places: the ensemble cast and Haggis’s script. The reviews repeatedly single out the actors for making schematic characters feel lived-in, and several credit the writing for putting blunt talk about race and class in Los Angeles at the centre of a mainstream drama. Screen Daily also picks out Mark Isham’s score. The New Yorker rates it among the strongest American films of its moment.
The reservations are as consistent as the praise. Even admirers concede the coincidences are convenient, the melodrama heavy and the redemption tidy. The spread is wide, from raves to outright dismissals. The Los Angeles Times finds the script airless and the message noxious, with only the actors rising above it; Time Out says a promising start collapses into melodrama and a stale redemption story. The Ringer, looking back years later, calls it influential but built on contrivance.
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The New Yorker
25 April 2005 · David Denby
90*
The movie packs every conceivable ill-tempered remark about race and intolerance in Los Angeles into a hyper-articulate, intelligent story of colliding lives that is brazenly alive and the strongest American film since Mystic River. It produces exhilaration through its frankness and emotional release.
The critic finds the film a blistering and incisive portrait of urban alienation and intolerance that confronts prejudice with unvarnished nastiness. While it occasionally goes overboard with irony and tidy catharsis, the caustic script and superb cast ground the story in believable emotional terrain, highlighted by moments of transcendent grace.
Praises the finely tuned ensemble drama about interconnected lives in Los Angeles brought together by collisions and encounters amid racial tensions. Highlights the fully developed characters and events that surprise and shock even seasoned viewers.
Calls it a superb addition to multi-storylined ensemble pieces about dysfunctional life in southern California, with a nuanced script and riveting acting that reveals complex, contradictory characters beyond initial stereotypes. Singles out intensely acted powerful moments and Mark Isham's score.
Haggis's ambitious directorial debut dissects race relations in LA through intersecting lives over a short period. It is a haunting, perceptive and uncompromising examination saved by an outstanding cast, even when stretching credibility or ladling on pathos.
Haggis's debut proposes that almost everyone has racial hang-ups and connects disparate characters in the multicultural mix of LA. Despite heavy-handed moments, obvious melodrama and convenient coincidences, it is worth watching for its humour, details and strong performances.
The film offers a passionately felt, somewhat contrived but highly watchable drama that heads straight at race and class divisions in LA. It assembles a fine cast and dares to put painful truths about race relations centre-stage in terse, provocative language.
The film belongs to a genre of ambitious, allegorical ensemble pieces that lack subtlety but pursue genuine feeling with blunt earnestness. It unfolds with dramatic power through its cast's conviction despite schematic characters and coincidences.
The critic finds it a very watchable and well-constructed piece of work and a potential script masterclass, but its supercharged fantasies of racial paranoia and humanist redemption are not to be taken too seriously.
Crash has virtues in its skill at arranging chain reactions of anger and its honesty about economic roots of tensions, but it feels like a social studies project with clumsy sanctimony and overemphasis on the ignoble side.
Notes that the film starts promisingly with vivid vignettes and intriguing scenes but steadily falls apart into melodramatic implausibility and a hackneyed hymn to redemption. Compares it unfavorably to superior works like Code Unknown or City of Hope.
Haggis weaves multiple characters into a suffocating tangle of ham-fisted ironies and coincidences that reveal latent racism but feel like a grim, histrionic experiment with a noxious message. Glimpses of honesty come only from the actors who rise above the airless script.
The critic finds it a well-written, well-acted, thought-provoking drama that forces viewers to confront racial issues, though depressing; praises the ensemble cast and writing for bringing the stories to life.
The critic calls Haggis's directorial debut a triumph of subtlety, praising its ensemble storylines that intersect to expose racial paranoia and tension in Los Angeles without sentimentality. They highlight the strong performances and the film's alive, shaking quality while noting the Bullock-Fraser subplot as the one weaker element.
The critic argues that the Best Picture winner, despite its current reputation as ridiculous and overly melodramatic, has had a pronounced influence on how film and television explore race and identity through ensemble structures and contrived racial encounters. He singles out its tendency to use bigotry as a shortcut and its absurd contrivances as the main flaws, while noting one modest, insightful scene with the character Jean.
Ordered by the weight we give each publication, then by score. Scores are normalised to 100; * means inferred from an unrated review. Summaries are ours, not quotations; follow the links for the reviews themselves. How we rate
