Pain-no gain
The manipulative, preposterous ‘Collateral Beauty’ is 94 minutes you’ll never get back
HE Will Smith weepie “Collateral Beauty” couldn’t be more calculated and manipulative if it slapped you on the back, shoved a giant lollipop into your mouth and immediately tried to sell you a time share in Tampa, Fla.
Smith plays Howard, an advertising executive who, after his 6-year-old daughter dies, retreats from the world and becomes obsessed with dominoes, which is inconvenient to his colleagues (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Peña) who want him to agree to sell the company.
He holes up in his apart- ment writing pained, yet insipid, letters to concepts — Love, Death and Time — which he then stamps and puts in the mailbox.
His colleagues, stealing the letters from the mailbox, decide the best bet for their grieving friend is to have him declared legally insane so they can sell his company out from under him. I declare this movie legally inane, and I’d love to have my time back because I was annoyed to death.
Since nothing says friendship like cheating a pal after his kid just died, the lovable co-workers hire a troupe of actors to defraud Howard by impersonating Love, Death and Time. Each follows Howard around arguing that he’s wrong about them while he’s surreptitiously filmed so the friends can commit fraud on top of fraud by digitally erasing the paid actors from the videos. That way it’ll look like Howard is a crazy person talking to himself, and everyone can get rich! This must be the first movie ever made in which the death of a child is presented as a pesky obstacle to a corporate sale.
The scheme itself sounds crazier than Howard writing letters to abstractions: He could verify that Love (Keira Knightley), Death (Helen Mirren) and Time (Jacob Latimore) aren’t invisible, as they claim, by asking anyone in New York City except the six people in on the scam if they can be seen. Instead, he falls for it, and even starts attending therapy sessions headed by a kindly counselor (Naomie Harris). Those sessions lead to a development that’s such laughable and contrived movie mawkishness that, 30 minutes before it kicked in, I dismissed it as too corny for even the hackiest hack in Hackensack. I was wrong: Like the guy who developed the bacon-wrapped pizza, screenwriter Allan Loeb has made a quantum leap in shamelessness.