Smith Month - Mini Review - Collateral Beauty

In cinema history there have been many horrors, killer clowns, serial killers with clown masks, reliving the same day over and over again, sociopaths, ghosts, zombies, things that go bump in the night and literally anything by Adam Sandler these days but none are more scary than Will Smith trying to win an Oscar

We conclude Smith Month with the most recent of Will Smith’s Oscarbaiting flicks, Collateral Beauty. Can’t we do Bright instead? No? Oh joy. Despite a star-studded cast, this movie was panned by critics with only a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and whilst moderately successful thanks to it’s low budget, it made less than $100m and marks one of the lowest openings of Will Smith’s career. That Oscar just seems further and further away.

This was so close to being a rage review, I tell you. I hate just about every single aspect of this movie. I hate every single character in this movie. I hate every contrived co-incidence, I hate it’s uber serious tone and more importantly, I hate what this tried to convince me it was in the trailers.

What the trailers implied we were seeing would’ve been interesting. And I’ll give you this. I don’t think the grief that Will Smith’s character in is unrealistic. The loss of a daughter, especially one so young will forever change you and if you aren’t able to open up, it can lead to a downward spiral. Frankly, I’m not sure what’s stopped him from going further, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, I’m really not sure why he stopped at dominoes… This started out as a compliment and has turned into an insult.

Where was I? Having Death, Love and Time in a moment of grief and try and make him realise what he’s become is something, it’s a charming fantasy about dealing with grief. Try Big Hero 6 but without the superhero stuff.

But no what we have here is 3 friends of the victim, desperate to make a deal to gain money and save their asses, whilst he has the voting shares and isn’t willing to even talk about the sale. Needing to prove that he isn’t in the right state of mind to vote, they decide to hire a PI, when I’m pretty sure him spending 2 years doing nothing but building and pushing down dominoes kinda qualifies!

Anyway, the PI discovers he writes convenient letters to thing that used to be mantras, Love, Death and Time so they hire actors to play the recipients to appear before him and make him believe he’s crazy. F*ck all of them for agreeing to it, F*ck Edward Norton’s character for coming up with this sh*tty idea, f*ck the PI for agreeing to all this shady sh*t and f*ck the actors for agreeing to it. Also, f*ck the actors for acting in character outside of their f*cking acting arrangements

I have particular disdain to Edwards Norton’s character. He’s the one who comes up with this stupid scheme, his pathetic affair is what lead to Will Smith’s character having the majority voting shares in the first place and I hate every single thing about how he handles rejection with his daughter. She hates him because of the affair and that’s perfectly understandable. The idea that he has to push harder to be more of a father to her is not in my opinion good advice, it could well do much more damage than implied. It doesn’t help that his character spends most of the movie flirting. I wanted to shoot him every time he was on screen.

Let’s move onto Kate Winslet’s character... Yes, I know they have names, and I’m sure I’ll tag them but I don’t want to call them by their names. She’s the most likeable of the 3 in that she’s the one who has the most doubts and is actually the kindest to Will Smith’s character overall, covering for him at work, bringing him food, even paying his rent. But it’s taken a toll on her and she’s past the menopause. I hate her relationship with ‘Time’ in fact I hate ‘Time’ in general. I hate his confrontational nature, that’s really it.

Helen Mirren’s ‘Death’ is the one clearly having the most fun with the role, I feel uncomfortable every time she’s on screen because of this, also the twist at the end is just some contrived bullsh*t. Her partner in the movie is Michael Pena’s character, who in a massive co-incidence, happens to be dying.

Kiera Nightly plays love and is the most reluctant, unfortunately most of her scenes are with Edward Norton which means I have to hate them by default.

So, the plan is successful, Will Smith thinks he’s crazier than he actually is and what follows is the fact that Will Smith has been aware of their issues and done nothing, which I find makes me dislike him as a character more than if he’d just been oblivious. There’s a relationship running in the background with a character played by Naomie Harris. In what I think is a decent twist, it turn out they were the parents of the child that died. My only problem with her is the title drop scene, which it turns out was from Helen Mirren’s character because this movie couldn’t be more contrived and non-sensical.

This movie is an immoral, badly thought out, disgusting, misleading, depressing and irritating piece of sh*t. I’m glad that after finishing this, I never have to watch it again. Still, it doesn’t have any technical faults that were noticeable and the acting is pretty good.

Rating 25/100