Collateral Beauty

As is tradition, the night before the Oscar ceremony takes place, the 37th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards will descend on Los Angeles to commemorate the worst that Hollywood had to offer in 2016. A mean-spirited diss-fest in the estimation of some, a good-natured ribbing to others, the so-called Razzies are twice as unpredictable and ten times as frank as the usual awards program. The expected categories of Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Actor/Actress share space with the distinctions of Worst Screen Combo and Worst Prequel, Remake, Ripoff, or Sequel at the ignominious ceremony. Some celebrities take the jokes in stride (Sandra Bullock famously showed up to receive her Worst Actress Razzie for All About Steve the day before she dropped by the Oscars to pick up her Best Actress prize for The Blind Side), but the program goes widely ignored by the industry overall.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving is all about.

Everyone knew that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story wasn’t going to match the opening weekend of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That film had hype on its side, drawing off the power of a lengthy dry spell for fans and the presence of the original trilogy’s cast members. It’s unlikely that any Star Wars movie will match it ever again. With all of that said, the opening weekend of Rogue One should still be considered an enormous success, especially since these numbers would be nothing short of indisputably incredible if Star Wars wasn’t in the title.

There were a lot of great movies in 2016. There were! Please don’t let this list convince you otherwise. The movies were absolutely wonderful this year. Just not these specific movies. These were bad. So, so, so bad. Just awful.

This review contains basic plot details for Collateral Beauty which for some reason were not included in the movie’s trailer. If you don’t want to know the movie’s basic premise, don’t read this article. I would also recommend not seeing the movie, but that’s up to you.

Following through on the soupy metaphysics and syrupy emotionality of past projects Seven Pounds and The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith completes his “All Along, the Meaning of Life… Was Love” trilogy on December 16 with David Frankel’s Collateral Beauty. A new trailer for the inspirational/”inspirational” morality play has surfaced online today, and it contains all the sky-high emotions, A Christmas Carol-but-with-a-soul narrative structuring, and elaborate domino structures that audiences would expect. It could certainly use more footage of Smith playing with dominos, but then, what movie couldn’t?

You know when you’re a kid and you write letters to Santa Claus? Pretend you’re actually a middle aged man suffering from depression, you write a letter to the universe and, BOOM Helen Mirren shows up in response! But she’s not Santa Claus, she’s Death.