Watching the first hour of this well-meaning film is like being assaulted by an after-school special: it's strident and self-important and joyless, with nary a word wasted on anything that's not a bullet point in the plot outline. Once it's recovered from its Magnolia-esque (or Magnolia wanna-be) opening, it strives to wrap all of its flopping plot strands up into neat little bows, turning into an almost unbelievably Pollyanna-ish fable about redemption and karma. In between, there are some good performances and one or two great ones, but the actors struggle against the characters they inhabit and the words they're speaking. Writer-director Paul Haggis, who wrote the wonderfully subtle Million Dollar Baby, shows none of the restraint of that film. He's got Important Ideas that he Needs to Express, and he's not going to let anything stand in his way.

The film's message is simple, and true, and repeated insistently: we're all racists. I'm a racist, Paul Haggis is a racist, maybe even Gandhi was a racist. Everyone in the film, save three or four characters, has a racist outburst, insulting their loved ones, their coworkers, the woman at the HMO, the locksmith, other drivers, store owners, etc. My main problem with the film is that it works nothing like reality. Characters have conversations that people don't have; situations develop in ways that benefit the intricate plot threads but don't resemble the way life plays out. We're all racists, but many of us make it through our entire lives without having a racist outburst. In this film, everyone is candid (or, more bluntly, a big asshole) about his or her opinions. I'm not saying that there aren't people like this in the world, because there are plenty of them. But cramming them all, along with their hatreds, into a two-hour movie is just too much. It pushes the boundaries of acceptable levels of coincidence. If it had followed fewer stories, let them play out over a longer period of time, I'd buy it. In this film, it's too many stereotypes clamoring to be heard.

The film follows a gaggle of characters in interconnected stories over 24 hours in Los Angeles. Leading the way is Don Cheadle, who plays Detective Waters, a police officer who's asked by his superiors to help them wrongly convict a white cop who shot a black cop. Waters is sleeping with his Hispanic partner Ria (Jennifer Esposito); his mother is a drug addict and his younger brother Peter (Larenz Tate) is a carjacker who runs with Anthony (Ludacris). Peter and Anthony rob the District Attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Jean (Sandra Bullock) and steal their SUV at gunpoint. Back at home, Jean has a screaming fit about the Hispanic locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena), whom she thinks is a gang member. Daniel has a run-in with a Persian store owner, Farhad (Shaun Toub), over whether the store's back door needs to be replaced. Earlier, Farhad and his daughter Shereen (Marina Sirtis) bought a gun to protect the store, against Shereen's wishes. In another part of the city, angry racist cop Ryan (Matt Dillon) and his partner Hanson (Ryan Phillippe) pull over a rich black couple, TV producer Cameron (Terrence Howard) and Karen (Thandie Newton), and Ryan assaults Karen while the powerless Cameron looks on.

Many critics have talked about how bleak the film is, but things work out amazingly well—Pollyanna-ish, as a friend put it—for everyone save two main characters. I can't discuss it without giving away crucial plot points, so you might want to stop reading if you haven't seen the film. Take Ryan, Matt Dillon's character. He has a racially charged run-in with his HMO administrator Shaniqua (Loretta Devine), and he assuages his feelings of powerlessness by assaulting Karen. Later in the film, he achieves redemption when he pulls Karen from her burning car, saving her life. Or take Farhad, whose store is burglarized and the insurance company won't pay because he didn't get the door replaced. He decides it's Daniel's fault, and he takes his new gun and goes to shoot Daniel when he comes home from work. Daniel's young daughter Lara (Ashlyn Sanchez) runs out to protect her daddy, and Farhad pulls the trigger—but Shereen has accidentally loaded the gun with blanks! The redemption here is twofold: Farhad escapes being a murderer and realizes what he's almost done, and Daniel has kept his promise to always protect his daughter. Or what about Sandra Bullock's Jean, who fears all minorities. She gets her come-uppance when she slips and falls down the stairs, and the only person around to help her is her new best friend, her housemaid Maria (Yomi Perry). Jean has learned two valuable lessons: you have more to fear from accidents in your own home than you do from street thugs (although two of them robbed her at gunpoint...), and Hispanics are good people, especially when they're paid to take care of you. This goes on and on: Cameron gets to demonstrate his manhood, Anthony gets to do a good deed, etc. Of the main characters, only Waters and Hanson suffer lasting pain. (One might say that Peter suffers because he dies, but screenplays like this require sacrifice, and Peter's death is included only as part of Waters's punishment.)

And yet I almost liked it, because of how the actors struggled, and sometimes succeeded, to rise above the domineering message and create real people. Don Cheadle deserves another Best Actor nomination; Terrence Howard deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination to go with the Best Actor award he probably should get for Hustle & Flow. Others fail to escape the script: Brendan Fraser, whom I think is a good actor, is hulking and stiff, and almost all of the women suffer from being under-written, none of them showing anything resembling three-dimensionality. This is an Important Film, but I wish it had taken the time to be a good one too.