Crash tells the interlocking stories of people of different ethnic backgrounds. Whites, blacks,Koreans,Latinos,Iranians,the police and the criminals, the rich and poor, and the powerful and the less fortunate.Directed by Paul Haggis this film had a budget of only $6 million dollars. Haggis had to use his own house for scenes and actually used his own vehicle for other scenes.



This Paul Haggis film, written with Robert Moresco, uses interlocking stories to show we are in the same boat, that prejudice flows freely from one ethnic group to another. His stories are a series of contradictions in which the same people can be sinned against or sinning There was once a simple morality formula in America in which white society were the racist and the blacks were victims, but that model is long obsolete in this ever diversified nation that we now live in. Different ethnic people have entered the game: Latinos, Asians, Muslims, and those defined by sexual orientation, income, education or appearance. The narrative in Crash shifts between 5 or 6 different groups of seemingly unconnected characters, whose relationships to each other are only revealed in the end.

A rising young district attorney (Brendan Fraser) gets carjacked and despairs that the perpetrators had to be black. His pampered wife (Sandra Bullock, who's barely in the movie, retreats behind a wall of privileged paranoia, taking it out on Daniel (Michael Pena), a Mexican locksmith with jailhouse tattoos. Daniel, of course, is a sweet-natured husband and father struggling to get his family to a neighborhood where the gunfire doesn't pop all night. He also struggles to keep his cool when dealing with Farhad (Shaun Toub), an Iranian shopkeeper who understands English only as it suits him and is so convinced the world is ripping him off that he buys a gun against the wishes of his upscale daughter (Bahar Soomekh). Most central to the movie's harrowing vision are two LAPD cops, the venomously racist Ryan (Matt Dillon) and the good-hearted rookie Hanson (Ryan Phillippe). We first meet them as Ryan decides to pull over a Lincoln Navigator in which yuppie film director Cameron (TerrenceHoward) and his wife Christine (Thandie Newton) are engaged in a bit of horseplay.

The scene gets ugly and Dillon turns Ryan into a genuinely hateful man. So it's a shock when''Crash" humanizes the cop later in the game. That becomes the film's central theme. The director dares us to assume we know. [Cameron is further humiliated on a film set by his producer (Tony Danza)]

Moral issues has been put forth beautifully in the film. We can feel Christine's humiliation and be sympathetic towards Cameron.This movie will shed some light on racism and prejudice and let the world know that there are many many untold stories such as 'Christine's and 'Cameron's' in modern America. Don Cheadle's performance as Graham, the police detective who connects the story's tangents and who becomes the film's weary heart is outstanding. You get a sense of LA's racial gridlock in his scenes.

This movie can make you laugh, cry as well as sympathize towards many of the characters, on comparison with the real life situation. Paul Haggis's film has to be applauded for making such an intense, honest, powerful, memorable and enlightening film. I believe that his film has to be one of the most interesting and thought provoking films that I have ever seen.