Collateral Beauty

2016 drama

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A sad guy's "friends" hire a trio of actors to play Love, Time, and Death and engage with him in order to prove that he's crazy and enjoy financial gains. What the fuck?

I'd heard such bad things about this movie that I thought it would be worth watching and making fun of. It's a bad movie, and it's a despicable movie filled with dishonorable characters, but there's definitely no fun to be had. It drips with hyper-sappy melodrama, it attempts to break up the malaise with humor that falls flat, and really doesn't make much sense.

You've certainly got some big names in this. Will Smith isn't awful, but he has trouble playing a real person in movies. Here, he's required to play a really sad real person, and although he's got his moments, the performance isn't really consistent. Mostly, he just mopes around. Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Michael Pena go through the motions, at times seeming like actors who have realized they've made a horrible mistake and hope nobody actually sees the movie. Keira Knightley's easy on the eyes but apparently a poor decision maker. And Helen Mirren should really know better than to get involved with something like this. She's apparently just given up.

I didn't realize this was a Christmas movie or I would have saved it.

The movie has two twists. One of them is as predictable a twist as you'll ever see. The other doesn't make a lick of sense. Both of them made me a little angry.

I don't know the following:

1) How this story was greenlit
2) Why these actors who aren't hurting for work decided to be in it
3) What "collateral beauty" even means
4) Why I'm spending so much time writing about this