Numbingly nonsensical: Review of Collateral Beauty by Rashid Irani

Even a stellar cast of Will Smith, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren and Edward Norton can’t save this disaster.

COLLATERAL BEAUTY

A successful advertising executive suffers a tragedy and tries to seek answers by writing letters to Love, Time and Death, with unexpected results.

Direction: David Frankel

Actors: Will Smith, Kate Winslet

Rating: 1 / 5

The premise is quirky all right. The partner of a New York-based ad agency (Smith) falls into a spiral of depression following the sudden death of his six-year-old daughter.

Living more or less as a recluse, the grieving father ignores his business, barely speaks to anyone and spends most of his time writing letters to Love, Time and Death.

Before you can say boo, the lonely soul is being visited by personifications of said three abstractions. And it goes downhill from there.

Much like the row of multi-coloured dominoes in the adman’s office, Collateral Beauty topples under the weight of its pseudo-profundity.

Read: Collateral Beauty helped Will Smith cope with father’s death

Even the stellar cast — besides Will Smith and Kate Winslet, we have Helen Mirren, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley and Naomie Harris, no less — is numbed into stupor by the nonsensical script.

Small wonder that Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara, originally slated to portray the leads, bailed on the project.

The blatantly manipulative direction by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) strives in vain to sidestep the pitfalls of preposterous twists and turns in the narrative.

Much like the row of multi-coloured dominoes in the adman’s office, Collateral Beauty topples under the weight of its pseudo-profundity.

Watch the trailer for Collateral Beauty here