Reviews
by R. Thomas Umstead -- Multichannel News, 10/12/2008 8:00:00 PM
CRASH
(Starz, Friday, Oct. 17, 10 p.m. )
Starz's first foray into the original scripted series genre hopes to bring the Academy Award-winning movie Crash to the small screen.
Unlike the movie, the series pilot does not revolve around a number of car accidents that link people of different ethnic backgrounds together, but nevertheless touches on the inevitable debris left when fears and stereotypes of various cultures clash.
One car crash — between a feisty Latin woman (Moran Atias) and a misbehaving cop (Kenny Battaglia) — does begin to weave the string of unique, unexpected and complex relationships between people within the cultural melting pot of Los Angeles.
The hour-long series, produced by the creative team behind the movie (Paul Haggis, Bobby Moreco and Don Cheadle), actually opens with an in-limo confrontation between aging and wild record producer Ben Cendars (Dennis Hopper) and his attractive, young female driver. After he spouts poetic muses and then exposes himself to the disgusted driver, she leaves him in the middle of a posh Los Angeles neighborhood to drive himself home.
Cendars then hires a streetwise African-American (Jocko Sims), who is quickly exposed to Cendars' self-destructive personal habits, while also being forced to confront his own questionable habits and beliefs.
Meanwhile, the sudden illness of the father of a suburban housewife (Clare Carey) during her 40th birthday dinner prompts an encounter with Eddie (Brian Tee), a Korean emergency medial technician whose gang-related tattoos stir her prejudices to the point at which she suspects him of taking her father's missing watch.
Eddie is then pulled back into the gang life he vowed to leave behind when he reluctantly aids a gang associate who was shot. That leads to a confrontation with a dirty cop (Nick Tarabay), playing both sides of the law.
Much like the movie, the series seeks to examine people's various prejudices and fears of others that aren't like them, which often stem from their own insecurities and shortcomings. The action scenes are credible, but they are few and far between, while long stretches of dialogue between the characters at times bog down the flow of the developing stories. The challenge for Starz will be to keep audiences engaged and focused on the various storylines over 13 episodes. But from initial impressions, it looks like Crash is up to the challenge.
