Watch Collateral Beauty and find out.
Collateral Beauty just doesn't work. It keeps trying to be something profound and meaningful but it is crafted in such a pedantic manner that it all feels just too orchestrated. Nothing about Collateral Beauty feels honest or real. Writer director Allan Loeb's style is to shoot everything concretely. Forcing you into corners as the audience so that you have to see things a certain way. There is no subtlety to his artistry and it's all very heavy handed. So is his script which very clearly draws out its parallels, it's twist and turns almost to make sure the audience gets his point. He hits us over the head with his schmaltz.
So instead of feeling any of what he's trying to express, we instead feel rather numb.
Everything lines up all too perfectly in Collateral Beauty. The character playing "death" is set up to speak to the character who is dying. The character who is playing "love" has a character who has screwed up love fall for her. And it's like this on and on. None of it feels organic but instead it feels set up. Then when the story reaches the third act, everything just falls in place so easily. Solutions are found. Wounds mended. The film does nothing to earn any of those resolutions but by this point you don't care.
The real sadness of Collateral Beauty is how you assemble this fine a cast and make them all feel like they are slumming.
Collateral Beauty
Starring: Will Smith, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Naomi Harris, Kate Winslet, Jacob Latimore, and Michael Pena
Director: Allan Loeb
Writer: Allan Loeb
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