Will Smith’s Collateral Beauty bombed badly at the box office this weekend, but not for a lack of star power. Besides Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, Michael Pena, and Naomie Harris all have significant roles in this overwrought drama. Big names might get the average moviegoer to consider your release, but there’s one other element that’s necessary to ensure a financial or critical success: your movie has to be good.
Collateral Beauty is not good. It’s needlessly complicated, treats its audience like it’s dumber than a box full of unused Fox network reality show pitches, and totally wastes Will Smith in a dull tearjerker that elicits absolutely zero tears, except the ones you will shed when you realized you wasted your hard-earned money on Collateral Beauty.
Let’s start with the obvious. If the plot of a Will Smith movie sounds kind of like Seven Pounds, you know trouble is a-brewin’. Seven Pounds is, of course, the movie where a grief-stricken Will Smith commits suicide by sharing a bathtub with a jellyfish. In that film, sad Will Smith spends the entire runtime atoning for killing someone while driving and texting. It’s po-faced, grim and dull. Just like Collateral Beauty it has a needlessly convoluted plot.
In this case, Will Smith plays an ad executive so consumed with sadness after his daughter dies that he refuses to work, which, as you might imagine, is not ideal for an ad agency. In order to keep a major contract, the company needs Smith’s character to get back to work, so they hire actors to pretend to be physical manifestations of the concepts of love (played by Keira Knightley), time (Jacob Latimore) and death (Helen Mirren). The solution to Smith’s writer’s block issue is to make him think he’s clinically insane. That always works.
It’s not even a real fantasy film! It’s someone making Will Smith think he’s in a fantasy film. That extra layer of artifice is not necessary, and actually harmful to your ability to enjoy Collateral Beauty. As every negative review has pointed out about this movie, this might be the cruelest trick ever played on a grieving fictional character in the history of drama. But it gets worse! Big Willie Styles starts going to a grief support group and falls for the head of the group, played by Naomie Harris. This is going to completely ruin this movie if you have some sick notion of seeing it, so fair warning.
You see, Harris and Smith share the grief of a lost child. Their stories have much in common, which naturally draws them together. In fact, their stories are the same because they are actually exactly the same. Will Smith has had amnesia the entire movie and doesn’t remember that Naomie Harris is his wife. So, not only is this movie cruel, it’s also very, very strange and kinda tone-deaf.
No one goes into a Will Smith movie wanting it to be bad (unless you’re say, Bill Bellamy, who constantly lost parts to Will Smith in the mid-90s). Will Smith is one of the world’s most beloved movie stars and is so likable that he made me sort of almost kind of enjoy I Am Legend. This guy is as close to foolproof as one can get from a casting perspective. He can carry a movie just with his smile.
And there is the major flaw with Will Smith movies like Collateral Beauty, Seven Pounds, Concussion, After Earth, Winter’s Tale, and pretty much any movie where Will Smith is supposed to be serious, sad, tortured, or in any way stymied by life itself. The Will Smith the planet fell in love with is fun. Think back to the great performances of Will Smith: Men in Black, Independence Day, Hitch (yes, Hitch), Ali, Bad Boys. There’s a palpable joy to his work.
That’s not to say that Will Smith is incapable of working in a drama. Pursuit of Happyness and Ali are definitely serious films, but in those movies, Smith plays a fighter. In one of those movies, he’s a literal fighter. His struggle is our struggle. Smith getting a job in Pursuit of Happyness makes me cry every time, because he has worked so hard to get to that point. He’s a good dad (besides the sleeping in the Bart station thing) that retains a sense of optimism in the face of rebuke after rebuke in his efforts to provide for his son. Collateral Beauty is as close to the exact opposite of that as possible. It’s dire. It’s emotionally manipulative without understanding how human emotions actually work. And it robs us of the Will Smith we love.
Focus is not much of a movie. It’s a trifle that is best consumed on an airplane or in the midst of a crippling fever. That said, it gives us Will Smith. The real Will Smith. The Will Smith who smiles. Navel-gazing Will Smith is not what we want. It’s not the actor we embraced, nor is it the best possible version of the actor we love. It’s as if Tom Hanks suddenly decided that he should play a serial killer in a movie. Bad Boys III cannot get here soon enough.
