But its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.
Since that creator is director Paul Haggis, a longtime TV writer who grabbed the gold ring last year by writing the script for Clint Eastwood's ''Million Dollar Baby," I guess he's earned the right to make a big statement. But, boy, does he want you to know it.
Traffic and race are the twin obsessions of everyone in ''Crash" -- the latter especially sends the characters into conniptions. Two young African-Americans, Peter (Larenz Tate) and Anthony (Chris Bridges, a.k.a. the rapper Ludacris), stroll down a busy boulevard and watch the rich Caucasians flinch. Anthony, the angry street-corner philosopher, muses, ''We're the only black people, surrounded by a sea of overcaffeinated white people -- why aren't we the ones scared?"
His friend has an interesting response, which I won't spoil, but it's fairly shameful, and it underscores that while Haggis thinks he's exploding racial clichés, he's really just rearranging ones we already live with.
Elsewhere in ''Crash," a rising young district attorney (Brendan Fraser) gets carjacked and despairs that the perpetrators had to be black (now he'll lose either the African-American vote or the law-and-order vote). His pampered wife (Sandra Bullock, who's barely in the movie, no matter what the trailers imply) retreats behind a wall of privileged paranoia, taking it out on Daniel (Michael Pena), a Mexican locksmith with jailhouse tattoos.
