I watched this while subbing for an 8th grade science class recently and was pleasantly surprised. Interwoven into a straightforward cop story/single dad story are a lot of pretty funny riffs on the human body. There are some real scenes of an unhealthy Bill Murray and some rapid fire Chris Rock jokes about the dirty side of the workings of the body. All in all, not bad for a movie with the potential to be awful.
A friend of mine fretted about watching Crash because he heard that it had an oversimplified take on racism. Some of the stories were a little too square, but I thought some of them had some nice nuance. I don’t know that real people talk about race as much as these movie characters do, but I was willing to let them be explicit for efficiencies sake. The thing that makes the movie work for me is that I found many of the stories to be compelling narratives.
I liked this movie a lot. While I am not ready to crown Leonardo and Damon as the Pacino and DeNiro of our time, they do good stuff. While the acting and story are good, I found the most enjoyable characters to be Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg. Their fast cussing ways were very entertaining. Though in hindsight, they feel almost too exagerrated; like they became Irish cop clowns.
