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Preachiness drags down the beautifully made 'Crash'

"Crash" moves fast and relentlessly through its dense, snaky story, dropping bombshells and provocations along the way and doing it with style, purpose and often stunning virtuosity. The whipsaw structure — "Magnolia" meets "Pulp Fiction," with "21 Grams" and "Traffic" thrown in for social urgency — is an excellent device to distract you from the film's preachy histrionics about race relations but can't save it from the blubbering bathos into which it skids and, well, crashes.

Lions Gate Films 'Crash' 2 out of 5 stars Director: Paul Haggis Starring: Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Tony Danza, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Ludacris, William Fichtner, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Dashon Howard Run time: 113 minutes Release date: May 6, 2005 Rating: R for language, sexual content and some violence. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Crash"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

That's too bad, because "Crash" is a work of such plain accomplishment you wish it was better. The acting is formidable — Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe and, that's right, Sandra Bullock make searing turns — and writer-director Paul Haggis has diagrammed the script's curlicued complexities with geometric aplomb. (Haggis wrote the script for "Million Dollar Baby.")

All this fine filmmaking, though, works in the service of a ham-fisted moral saga cloying enough to make your teeth hurt. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, the movie takes on every possible permutation of racial bigotry, including hate crimes, carjackings, slurs, stereotypes, police brutality, ethnic profiling — you name it, it is here in screaming, hairy italics.

Haggis musters an improbable compression of extremes, so that every scene and every line conveys notions of toxic racism, many of them donning the tattered rags of cliche. From the first scene, "Crash" plays like a desperate encyclopedia of racial misconceptions snatched from two express eras, the Rodney King 1990s and the post-9/11 present of disheartening xenophobia. Though we've heard it all before, over and over, Haggis does his best to give the from-the-headlines material personal, human dimensions. Occasionally he penetrates the didactic goo and succeeds. At those times, you can see what the film should have been.

"Crash" is built as a chain reaction of incidents, each thread expertly tied to the next, before arriving circuitously at an impossible rendezvous of immaculate closure. Two black thugs (featuring a tongue-flapping Ludacris) who suspect they weren't seated at a diner because of their color turn around and assault an upscale couple (Bullock and Brendan Fraser, who plays L.A.'s district attorney). The store of a Persian family is ransacked and strewn with anti-Arab graffiti, even though the owners are not Arab. A police officer (a scary then sympathetic Dillon) harasses and humiliates a black couple, who in turn have a torrid argument about their obsequious roles in white society. And so on.

This expansive dot-to-dot of people and plights is connected by unremitting tragedy and whopping coincidence. "Crash" wants to be opera, but the transparency of its pushy demagoguery nudges it closer to risible "After School Special" terrain. While its superior craftsmanship keeps it consistently involving, the film seeks profundities it cannot grasp.

It is, in the end, a sledgehammer message movie aflame with politically incorrect rage and bleeding-heart conciliation — even strains of Stanley Kramer and Spike Lee. That's a combustible combo, and a very, very messy one, too.