New Will Smith movie Collateral Beauty is getting panned

It looks as though Will Smith’s ‘McConaissance’ hasn’t started trundling into town just yet.

His new movie ‘Collateral Beauty’, a new drama from the director of ‘One Day’ and Marley and Me’, is getting quite the panning at the hands of the critics.

Despite an all-star cast including Helen Mirren, Ed Norton, Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet and Naomie Harris, the drama is yet another misfire for the once hot Hollywood property, going for a Frank Capra-esque ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’-type hit, but falling short.

It’s currently riding a 17% ‘fresh’ rating on reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, meaning the majority of reviews are poor.

Peter Bradshaw in a scathing one-starrer in The Guardian writes: “At the end of it, I screamed the way polar bears are supposed to when they get their tongues frozen to the ice.

“This horrifyingly yucky, toxically cutesy ensemble dramedy creates a Chernobyl atmosphere of manipulative sentimentality, topped off with an ending which M. Night Shyamalan might reject as too ridiculous. This isn’t Frank Capra. It is emotional literacy porn, like an aspirational self-help bestseller written by Keyser Söze.”

Dan Callahan for The Wrap adds: “To paraphrase Groucho Marx, this is a movie where we watch Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Naomie Harris, Keira Knightley and several other fine players bore holes in themselves so that we can watch the sap run out.

Stephen Whitty in the New York Daily News says, succinctly: “Will Smith should be looking for better movies.”

In The Village Voice, Alan Scherstuhl adds: “You’ll shake your head. You’ll still struggle to accept that what you saw on that screen actually played in theaters, was funded and approved by distributors, took a month or so of the lives of those extraordinary actors.”

Even the mildly positive points are heavily couched.

“By the end of ‘Collateral Beauty’, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety.

David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter decries the ‘goopy sentiment’, but adds: “Audiences who enjoy smiling through tears, and don’t mind having their buttons pushed in the most obvious ways, could probably do a lot worse.”

It’s out across the UK on Boxing Day.

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