Deviation Actions
Okay, I did say that the Zootopia re-review was going to be next, but this is something I need to get out of the way right now. Yes, I saw this movie, Collateral Beauty, a while back actually - it was the last movie I saw last year (I saw it in vacation), and my family are all big Will Smith fans, and I do love me some Will Smith, so this could have been a real treat, right?
HOOOOOOOO BOY. THIS is a BAD movie. This is the kind of bad movie that becomes legendary by its sheer shittiness.
So this movie’s plot is that Will Smith dealing with the grief of having lost his daughter to a horrible accident and is coping with it by sending these letters to the concepts of Death, Time, and Love, only for those concepts to then become personified and help him deal with his trauma.
Now, I know this sounds like a weepy, kind of corny, melodramatic movie that comes out around this time of year to try to tug at your heartstrings and maybe attempt to nab an Oscar or two. I’m not the biggest fan of these kind of movies because I find they just do nothing but try to be as emotionally manipulative as possible while giving you a cornball script and pretty shallow execution- it only succeeds because the themes in and of themselves are sad, and they only play them with the one note of sadness. This isn’t always the case, as a movie like Son of Saul works wonderfully by giving us far other emotions than just sadness- it also has fear, hope, suspense, it actually gets you to connect with the characters, so it’s not just sad for sake of being sad, there’s a lot more to it that allows it become more than “just another Holocaust movie”.
It may sound like I’m going off on a tangent, but I need to make this clear for a reason- I know these kind of movies exist, but if they don’t have much more going for them there’s no reason for me to see them, but at the very least they have the dignity to know what they are, and get in and get out. I thought this was going to be one of those. I thought I would just say that “yeah, I know some people will find this sort of thing sad, but it’s not for me. 4/10” and that’s where the story would normally end.
… unfortunately, not for this. To give the movie the very little credit it deserves it absolutely surprised me, blindsided me, you could even say it shocked me because it turned out to be absolutely NOT what I was expecting. What this movie DID turn out to be was one of the biggest, most pretentious, absolutely vile, mean-spirited piles of shit I have ever seen in my life.
For one, the plot of the movie that you see in the trailers (as I detailed above) is A BIG LIE! Yes, Will Smith does have to cope with the grief of losing his daughter, but two things: 1. He’s actually not the main character of the movie, it’s actually Edward Norton, Michael Pena, and Kate Winslet, his friends. 2. The plot involves them GASLIGHTING Will Smith. Eeeeeyup. What actually happens is that they all work for an ad agency where Norton and Smith are partner owners, and now that Smith is depressed they’re losing their clients because Ed Norton is pretty useless at dealing with them. So he, and two other co-workers, Pena and Winselt, all form a plan to sell the company under Will Smith’s nose- thanks to an offer they were given to have the company bought out by $17 per share (which is easy to remember when the movie only mentions it a measly twenty or thirty times throughout the movie’s run time)- by making him look crazy by hiring actors to play the abstract concepts of Death, Time, and Love (played by Helen Mirren, Jacob Latimore, and Keira Knightley, respectively) so they can get Will Smith fired. All while these actors all tie into in a “metaphorical way” to these three characters because one of them is dying, one of them has a daughter who hates them, and the other one works too much to the point where they ignore having kids, even though these people are some of the most cruel assholes in New York City history.
That sure does sound like a fun movie, doesn’t it?! Where… the fuck… do I begin?
The story is by far what gets on my nerves the most. For one it’s a movie that it’s basically built on conveniences for 90% of the time; the tension of the movie hinges on nobody, aside from Will Smith, being able to see that these actors are there. So everyone else around them just pretends that these actors aren’t there to keep the illusion that they are visions that Will Smith is seeing to prove that he’s gone crazy. One of the most egregious examples of this happens when we see through a digital camera Will Smith talking with Helen Mirren but she’s somehow removed from the footage even though EVERYONE ELSE AROUND THEM KNEW THAT SHE WAS ACTUALLY THERE, because apparently these concepts can decide to interact with other people just because they can. In NEW YORK CITY. Because Will Smith just accepts that these concepts are real, and not once bothers to find out if this is true, even though this is a plan that could have easily backfired. So did these three scumbags also hire everyone else in New York to act as if they can’t see Death, Time, and Love because that would ruin the illusion? No explanation given on that at all! The movie also has two particularly awful twist endings, which I’ll get to once I go through the rest of things wrong with this abomination of a movie.
Not since Movie 43 have I seen so many good actors completely wasted on such awful material. Most of the actors are directed like they were on a middle school play, and this is one of those movies where it was clearly only given the direction of “act sad. No, sadder. No, REALLY sad, because we need to wring out every single piece of emotional manipulation out of this wretched piece of trite”.
Yes, I know that movies by nature are manipulative, but there is a way to have a movie tug at your heartstrings in a genuine way that is earned when the characters and conflict are that well fleshed out and allow you to get invested because you want to see these people succeed- a movie like Anomalisa pulls this off because even though the main character himself isn’t necessarily a completely good person, they flesh out his dilemma so well that you completely understand why he goes through what he does- you can feel the emotions, you can connect with him, you can relate to the situations because they managed to make them feel completely and absolutely real, and when those sort of real emotional situations get pulled off in the way that something like Anomalisa does it, it sticks with you, it weighs on your mind, it makes you feel a rollercoster of emotions and it really hits home!
That doesn’t happen when the main characters are all slimy scumbags who want to screw over their friend majorly (whom, by the way, is apparently depressed enough by his daughter’s death that he pretty much becomes a vegetable, yet still manages to keep himself fed, well-kept- sure he has a bit of grey in his hair, but he’s still WILL SMITH), not really caring about his well-being because they are in actuality really shitty people- not that the movie ever calls them out on it because it’s too busy being really fucking proud of itself on how clever it is, and how much it’s trying to get you to cry. It’s monotonous at best, and it feels really underhanded at worst because it’s a movie that is trying to get a rise out of its audience in the cheapest way possible. It’s the reason why I absolutely despised movies like Home and Remember Me so much because they tried to pull the card of trying to make you feel emotional investment on a movie that doesn’t really warrant it! But at least those movies only did them in bits and pieces, NOT THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE FUCKING THING!
And the dialogue! Oh God, is it terrible! Most of it is either talking about selling this building, it’s really stilted, or it means absolutely fucking nothing. They mention the phrase “collateral beauty” so much in this movie AND IT MEANS NOTHING! It’s a meaningless statement that wouldn’t get irritating if it wasn’t for the fact that they mention it SEVERAL IN TIMES IN THE MOVIE! It’s by far the worst title drop I’ve seen in any movies since, oh gee, THE LAST MOVIE I REVIEWED THAT STARRED WILL SMITH. “How could this movie get worse?” did you ask? I will tell you because this movie offers a very special deal: TWO shitty twists for the price of one, which I’m going to spoil because, fuck this movie.
The first twist is that the actors who played Death, Time, and Love… ACTUALLY ARE DEATH, TIME, AND LOVE! They were actually helping Michael Pena, Edward Norton, and Kate Winslet with THEIR problems instead of Will Smith… because that makes a lot of sense, it’s not like they’ve been fucking him over this entire movie. They also do end up taking their money ($20,000 each) for their services, which is admittedly the one genuinely funny thing about the movie (whether or not that was intentional is hard to tell because this movie fucking sucks).
The second, and by far WORSE, twist comes in the form of Howard (that’s Will Smith’s character) meeting this woman named Madeline (played by Naomi Harris, who appeared in Skyfall and Spectre, and another 2016 movie that I will talk about later, Moonlight) who works at this support group, to which Howard comes into and constantly interacts with her. Evidently she too lost a daughter in a tragic accident, and talks to him about how her ex-husband sends her notes that say “if only we could be strangers again”. However, it turns out that Will Smith IS her ex-husband, and she was talking about the same girl that they both lost the same way. At no point in the movie do you ever get a hint that these two used to be in a relationship of any way because they literally act like strangers around each other. Also, she’s completely okay with her ex-husband saying things like he just had a conversation with Death and Time.
DOES THIS MOVIE LOATHE ITSELF?! DO THEY GET OFF TO THIS?! IN WHAT PLANET DO THEY THINK THAT THIS IS HOW HUMANS INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER?! I DON’T GET IT! THIS MOVIE IS FUCKING INSANE!
Collateral Beauty is disgusting. This isn’t a movie like Anomalisa, or Son of Saul, or Her; those movies play with your heartstrings like a cellist with a perfectly smooth, fine-tuned bow. This movie plays the heartstrings like a lunatic ax murderer with a bloody, rusty hacksaw. This isn’t just bad, it’s offensive. It’s vile, it’s repulsive, and it may just very well be the worst holiday movie ever made. This is Oscar Bait done way, WAY wrong.
(1,855 words. Music: Undertale- Battle Against a True Hero)
I hate this movie. I absolutely, thoroughly, and very, VERY vehemently hate this movie. If not for Yoga Hosers, then this might be the worst movie I've seen this year, though to give Yoga Hosers a bit of credit, at least that movie never pretended to be anything more than stupid, unfunny bad movie. I was a bit conflicted on what to rate this movie, but I think I've got it.
