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Collateral Beauty (2016)

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Collateral Beauty is about loss.  In this film, Will Smith's Howard has lost his daughter.  He's having a hard time coping with it and his life, obviously, hasn't been the same since.  How do you recover from losing your six year old daughter to a rare form of cancer?  The answer is that you really can't.  Some people might cope better but no one really gets over it.  So understandably, his life and all that he holds dear to it, kind of goes to hell.  His marriage falls apart, he no longer cares about his friends or his business and he no longer cares about himself.  

 

Even in this spoilers allowed forum, I will not give too much away.  But I'll just say that I kind of knew where they were going with this about half way through it.  And it was a very different and pretty original idea.  I liked the film quite a bit.  His three friends are simultaneously trying to bring him back to life but also save their own asses.  And that's fine because everything they have worked for is on the line because of Howard's slide into depression.  

 

The cast in this is really good.  Smith knocks it out of the park but I also really enjoyed Kiera's performance and the performance of Naomi Harris, who might be best known for her James Bond work recently.  She's quietly strong but vulnerable as she too has suffered the loss of a child.  She's a group counselor and she tries to help Smith open up about his pain.  Every time she was on screen, she kind of had my undivided attention.  

 

The Collateral Beauty of the title was a nice tough.  This film has a bit of It's a Wonderful Life in it and the last five minutes had me sobbing.  

 

It's a good movie, not a great one but it is certainly worth seeing.

 

8/10

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I saw this film two months ago early in the morning at 10 AM at a WB Screening room and thought it was good. I wrote my entire review in an old journal. 
A month later I lost that journal at the theater I saw Moana at and completely forgot about the film. I knew I had to watch it again to refresh my memory. I took a friend last night and went to the actual world premiere of the film and through the movie the review just came to me and then I erased nearly everythiing good I had because the smell of the cheese was so damn strong.


As many characters this film has, Will Smith, of course, gives a great performance. The majority of the film you see Smith with red eyes ready to cry. Ifeel it was easy for him to do it too. I assume he just had to think back to his “Oscar snub” for Concussion mixed with the negative critical reception for Suicide Squad and the waterworks were ready to come down. It’s a shame his character Howard is just a centerpiece of a larger (and honestly a mean-spirited story), because if he had a longer screen time, he would be considered for a Best Supporting Actor in a People’s Choice Award or something. The entire film is marketed as a Will Smith Christmas Carol, but the real story is more messed up than the trailers have you to believe.

What the trailer doesn’t show is that Howard is the head of this agency company but doesn’t sit in on meetings or answer his phone which results in a decline of the company. Because of fearing they’ll lose their job, three of his closest employees/friends encounter these actors and hire them to portray them as death, love, and time so they can interact with Howard and use it as evidence to get Howard out of the company. If this isn’t the most pretentious selfish storyline covered in fluff then I don’t know what is? 

What makes it even worse is that in the climax Howard realizes this all together as one. For Howard not really interacting with any of his colleagues that work for him throughout the film, it makes barely any sense that not only he knew what they have done, but even notice and point out their personal problems that they have themselves. You question how does he know all of this stuff when he doesn’t even acknowledge them throughout the entire film.
 


Rating: 2/5 | 42% 

http://www.rendyreviews.com/movies//collateral-beauty-review

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So you think it's selfish to want to keep your job and not have your company go bankrupt?  What Howard went through is horrible, but there's collateral damage from all of this as well.  It was not selfish on their part.  It was about survival and it was the right thing to do.  Howard even acknowledges that.

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Oh dear lord. I'm not sure there even is a starting point to discuss what went horribly wrong with Collateral Beauty. This movie is about as heartwarming and uplifting as getting a Christmas card that was found in the CVS trash bin, then urinated on, and then caked in mud by a loved one. It warps the mind that no less than 5 (soon to be 6) people who have either won or been nominated for Oscars signed on to a script that even the Hallmark Channel would reject for being too tacky.

 

Let's just CinemaSins this bitch and do a run through of all the nonsensical bullshit that happens in this movie, shall we? I'm spoiling the movie, don't say you weren't warned.

 

1) The whole premise of the movie is icky from the setup. It's been three years since Will Smith's daughter has died of cancer and his co-owners/"friends" Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Michael Pena are becoming increasingly worried for their once joyous, now catatonic friend who writes letters to Death, Time, and Love. Smith's co-owners are also becoming worried that their advertising agency is about to go under and that they'll lose their jobs because of Smith falling out of touch with reality. So what do they do? Their plan is to hire struggling stage actors Helen Mirren, Jacob Latimore, and Keira Knightley to play Death, Time, and Love to interact with Smith while Ann Dowd stalks him and records everything, digitally erasing the struggling actors afterwards so that the video can be shown to the higher-ups on the board to prove that Smith is mentally incompetent to run the company.

 

Yes, you read that correct: the three so-called friends plan on helping their buddy snap back to life...by GASLIGHTING him? And they actually believe they're helping him. Are they fucking insane?!

 

2) Smith starts lurking around a support group for parents who lost their children run by Naomie Harris. The point of Harris' role for the most part consists of repeating the movie's already stupid title over and over, as if "collateral beauty" will eventually mean something profound. It never does.

 

3) In a flimsy attempt at running storylines parallel to Smith's, each of his three co-owners are facing their own dilemmas: Norton's daughter hates him because he cheated on his ex-wife and ruined their family, Winslet wants to have a baby but has waited until it's too late to have one, and Pena is dying of a terminal illness and is keeping it a secret from his family. These just reinforce how emotionally false the whole movie is.

 

4) And now, we get to the movie's twists, which are so out of left field and ridiculous that even Shyamalan would cringe. The first is that Smith and Harris are eventually revealed to be ex-husband and ex-wife, and that the children that they lost was in fact the same exact young girl, and that he's been pretending he doesn't know her and she's gone along with this whole charade the entire time. IS THIS MOVIE FOR REAL?! How is that supposed to help anybody through their grief?! Is the screenwriter that out of touch with reality?

 

5) The movie's other insane twist is one of the most pathetic attempts at an "AHA!" moment that I've ever seen in a movie. In the last scene, Smith and Harris are back together taking a walk. Smith turns around sees Mirren, Latimore, and Knightley (who I will say has never looked more beautiful than she does in this; hey, gotta find a silver lining somewhere!) on the bridge smiling at him. When Harris turns around, they aren't there! BOOM! Did the three of them just sit around hoping that Smith's horrible friends would come along and present their crazy scheme? Are they like Mary Poppins where it's off to help the next grieving individual?

 

This movie:

 

Image result for what the fuck are you talking about gif

 

It's tempting to give it an even lower grade, but it did entertain me enough because of how ridiculous it all is, and the actors do give solid performances despite having to work with dog shit and deserve props for somehow getting through this movie with a straight face.

 

This holiday season has seen the release of Manchester by the Sea, a drama about dealing with loss and grief that is riveting, crushing, and very much true to life. Collateral Beauty is none of those things. This is a graceless, phony, and absolutely dunderheaded excuse for a motion picture that only the easily manipulated or a connoisseur of bad movies could enjoy that will rightfully go down as a low point in the filmographies of all the talented cast while wasting one of life's most precious entities, which happens to be personified within the movie.

 

D

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I forgot to mention that Will Smith goes on a LOT of angry bike rides in this movie. If you made a drinking game out of it, you'd be passed out by the time the credits started.

 

Everyone here should see this movie tbh. It's hard to believe such an asinine script apparently made a desired list at all.

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I think the Smith Harris story was beautifully done and they give plenty of hints as to who they are so that when you do get the reveal, it's a nice moment.

 

I guess I liked it much more than everyone else.  

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I don't think it's as bad as people make out.  It didn't click that she was his wife until he knocked on the door. However, I suspected there was something with the way love, time and death connected with each of their "coaches".

 

The filmmakers overplayed their hand with the twists. It's like they had 20 in blackjack and said "hit me".

 

They should have just left it at Howard and his wife finding each other again. 

 

 

Edited by DeeCee
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They gaslight a man who is still grieving for his dead child because they don't want to lose their jobs.

 

I think it's a great setup. Nobody wins here. The coworkers don't want to do it - Howard has helped them a lot, he's their friend. Howard....is still devastated. Even (Amy? Rose? Amy Rose?) Keira Knightly is like "This is fucked up.". I like how everyone knew they were in a bad situation.

 

I just think they never really go anywhere with it. It never moves beyond the starting line. There's three people you have to make me feel sorry for, and I like how those problems were related to family as well. But that was basical Norton being the second lead, Peña .... the editing with his character was really odd, it felt like he was fine and then suddenly on death's door - and Winslet (and for that matter, Jacob Latimore) being such an afterthought I constantly forgot they was involved. It's like a relay race where the people run five steps and shout at the other person to go one without them.

 

It's not badly acted. The sound mixing is really terrible at points. I liked the bits with the actors fleshing out Love, Death, and Time. I just think a lot of technicals and editing mangled something that could have been very good instead of "the potential is here, I don't have to dig too deeply to see it or have it displayed, but it's still disjointed and not very fleshed out.". It would have benefitted from either less characters or a longer running time (I was surprised to see it's only about an hour thirty).

 

Solid C. 

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Boring, Bland and Tasteless. Smith has reached peaks in terms of script selection! Gave me Seven Pounds vibes in several scenes, smith should understand that hes no longer the biggest draw he used to be. Please get back to action (apart from SS), comedy no more drama!

No choice apart from giving this one D.

Edited by John Rambo
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