Review of Life Itself (2018) by K Nife C — 01 Jan 2019

"Okay. Let's listen to Hoobastank now.".

This glib, meta treatment of Paul Haggis' Crash brought to us by the screenwriter of Cars is tonally stupid. Starting off aggressively obnoxious, every character played by this mostly A-list cast (Annette Bening, Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke, Olivia Wilde) seems to be a different facet of the same depressed 40 year old hipster. It's ridiculously saccharine at times, trying desperately not to come off as pretentious and failing. At the halfway mark it turns on a dime from a coy exploration of mortality to a Spanish melodrama. There's a method to the madness however because all of the contrived emotional whiplash is there to provoke a nice Hallmark channel cry, but it's hard to muster up any tears when you're too busy rolling your eyes. I'm not the only person to point this out, but it's easy to see the comparisons critics have drawn between this and Collateral Beauty. If there were one film this year that I would recommend watching just to experience the sheer baffling awfulness of...life itself, it would be...Life Itself.