Collateral Beauty

A thoroughly bizarre little movie, Collateral Beauty follows Will Smith’s Howard Inlet, an advertising executive mourning the loss of his young daughter, as his inability to cope (and refusal to sell his company) leads his coworkers to paint him as mentally unstable (which will effectively force him to part with his shares). There’s much, much more to Collateral Beauty than that relatively spoiler-free summation and it’s clear, increasingly so, that the movie requires an impossible suspension of disbelief from the viewer, as scripter Allan Loeb has packed the narrative with ludicrous elements that grow more and more difficult to comfortably swallow as time progresses – with the silliness of the coworkers’ scheme compounded by a recurring emphasis on absurd plot developments (eg a laughable use of non-existent technology, a couple of jaw-droppingly absurd twist endings, etc). The movie, which is never boring, at least, boasts an opening half hour that seems to contain a fair degree of promise, as the movie’s eclectic yet undeniably talented cast delivers down-to-earth work that initially offsets the preposterousness of Loeb’s screenplay. (This is, after all, a film that boasts appearances by, among others, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, and Helen Mirren). And although Smith turns in a typically solid performance as the tortured protagonist, Collateral Beauty‘s positive attributes are slowly-but-surely crushed beneath the weight of a progressively eye-rolling and impossible-to-swallow storyline – which is a shame, certainly, as the movie had the potential to be a searing portrait of grief and loss.

** out of ****