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Who is Paul Haggis and why should I care?

Actually, I don't and there's no reason I should. I'm just marveling at how well regarded he is and comparing that to how mediocre his work is. Maybe I'm jealous.

Haggis makes Message Films, and he makes them like that, with capital letters. He's like the noob who discovers the rocket launcher in Quake and that's all he'll ever use. He's like someone who has just discovered all the font possibilities within Word, so he uses all of them.

Consider Million Dollar Baby, written by Haggis. He got an Oscar nomination for the screenplay and the film went on to win the golden guy for best picture. Now I was attracted to see it because a) it was directed by Clint Eastwood and b) I find Hilary Swank to be very gentle on the eyes, even when she's all buffed up as an unstoppable female boxer. That this film should have been great was a no brainer.

Instead, the film literally had no brains and, much worse, assumed the audience had none.

I can't authoritatively comment on the boxing sequences. Some thought they were ludicrous but from a filmmaking point of view they were gorgeous. Tom Stern's photography is above reproach. I was mesmerized.

Then...The Accident. Just like that, with capital letters. Contrived, sure, but here's where the movie goes straight to hell. Swank's character has been portrayed as unstoppable, the sort of person who doesn't believe in giving up. She's a fighter from her toes to her fists to her head. Now...she just quits. I didn't buy it. This change was completely, utterly, and thoroughly not fitting with the character she just oh so carefully crafted.

Worse, she is -- as stated in the movie -- put in this superb extended care facility. And they let her get gangrene and have to amputate her leg? Uh huh, sure. Can you say "automatic malpractice"?

It keeps getting worse. This is in the here and now, in California, and she wants to die so Eastwood must kill her? No, no, no, no! It's a complete lie.

Do you know what it takes to be taken off life-support in the US of A today? You turn to your doctor -- as Swank's character could have -- and say, "Turn that damn thing off."

Done. Switch thrown, plug pulled, adios, senorita, vaya con dios.

In the end, Million Dollar Baby is a huge mess which makes no sense whatsoever. There's no point to any of it. The assisted suicide -- actually murder -- is unnecessary. The end is a fundamental lie.

Haggis returns to this form -- of building a morality tale around a lie or series of lies -- in his Oscar-winning fiasco called Crash. The entire film is contrived, with impossibly over-the-top racist incidents and characters, that come together and equal less than zero. Early on there's a sequence with Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges that is brilliant. It plays on every racial stereotype applicable at that moment and turns them all into brilliant satire. It made me hope and pray that this was how the entire film was going to go, and that would have been a magnificent thing, but no, it was but a fleeting moment, a golden opportunity lost.

And so now Haggis parades his "technique" and Message again with In the Valley of Elah and by all accounts it's the same crap again: An artificial morality tale spun out of a tissue of slanders and lies.

Who needs this crap?

But this isn't surprising. What's frightening is that he's listed as the screenwriter for the next Bond film. Which only proves that in Hollywood, nothing is sacred.

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