Crash

(Herald rating: * *)

A sprawling saga of life in a Los Angeles whose inhabitants are connected only by their disconnectedness, Crash is a slick but hollow addition to a genre that peaked with John Sayles' magnificent City of Hope in 1991 and Robert Altman's Short Cuts two years later.

At moments it grasps for the grand operatic sweep of those films but, in place of a theme, the film has A Message, which it delivers with a bludgeoning hectoring tone, and its forced attempts at dramatic irony look like glib coincidence.

Clever plotting and generous unshowy performances from a brilliant cast make it often engrossing and always watchable, but it's much less than it imagines it is. Worse, in its hamfisted attempts to depict the entire city as a simmering cesspool of race hate where white equals bad and non-white (almost) equals noble but helpless, it lurches from one patronising improbability to another.

The film opens with a voiceover about urban alienation that is intended to act as an epigraph: "In LA, no one touches," it says. "You crash into each other so you can feel something." The camera moves back to reveal the speaker: Graham Waters (Cheadle), a detective on the way to a murder scene with his partner and lover Ria (Esposito), has been rear-ended in traffic. The two drivers - the Hispanic Ria and a middle-aged Korean woman - immediately hurl racial abuse at each other. Thus is the film's title heavy-handedly explained (Angelenos' lives don't intersect, they collide violently) and its subtext laid out (there is no interaction, not even a lover's tiff - that is not racially charged).

Haggis, a veteran television writer and director (who penned the Oscar-nominated script for Million Dollar Baby) weaves nine sets of characters into the next two hours: two black men (Bridges and Tate) carjack Rick (Fraser) and Jean (Bullock).

Rick is, as it happens, the district attorney and Jean his neurotic wife.

Back home, he tries to work out his best political spin. She assumes that Daniel (Pena), the Mexican locksmith who has come to secure the house is casing the place.

And on it goes. Matt Dillon is a cop who hideously victimises a well-to-do black couple (Howard and Newton); Daniel's interaction with a Persian store owner whose racial anxiety has quite unhinged him almost leads to tragedy; Dillon's cop, who battles bureaucracy for his ailing father, will meet the black woman he assaulted under very different circumstances.

Only once does the film come up with an irony of any dramatic heft, when Cheadle's cop compromises himself to save his brother and is abused by his mother for betraying his family.

The rest is all so contrived and laboriously assembled that it feels as if it were written by a computer.

The performances redeem matters somewhat. Bullock, rich and spoiled, starved rake-thin by angst; Cheadle's sorrowful and wise detective; Dillon's vicious, yet even sadder, patrolman; the Persian family who long ago crossed the line that separates defiant pride from paranoia. There's not a player in the piece who doesn't struggle valiantly to support the weight of the script, but in the end, it's too much, even for the best of them.

CAST: Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Howard, Chris Bridges, Thandie Newton, Michael Pena.
DIRECTOR: Paul Haggis
RUNNING TIME: 113 minutes
RATING: R16, violence and offensive language.
SCREENING: All cinemas