Collateral Beauty review: one of the biggest cinematic catastrophes of 2016

At this point in the calendar, film enthusiasts occasionally gripe that the best-of-the-year lists emerge before some potential masterpieces have had a chance to properly set in. This works both ways. In the last weeks of December, we are treated to a film that demands inclusion in any catalogue of 2016’s grimmest cinematic catastrophes.

Here’s what must have happened. About a year-and-a-half ago, family members of many top Hollywood stars were kidnapped and placed under armed guard. These poor actors were then forced to go through a series of unspeakable humiliations before their relatives were released.

Lest the studio’s lawyers start sharpening their quills, we should clarify that this almost certainly didn’t happen. Such an outrage would, however, explain why so many usually sensible people have allowed themselves to be thus misused. Ed Norton, Will Smith, Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren: each time you raise your head from vomiting into the kidney dish you spot somebody else you once respected.

Among the many unenviable achievements of this film is its ability to consistently live down to that unspeakable title. A dishonest, morally corrupt exploitation of the grieving process – a procedure allegedly sweetened by “collateral beauty” – the lumbering drama begins with advertising executive Will Smith setting up a huge array of dominoes in his office. Did I imagine them sounding out the rhythms to the phrase “clanking metaphor” as they knocked each other over? Probably.

Will lost his daughter a few years previously and has let the business go to pot. Three of his senior employees (Norton, Winslet and Michael Peña), each of whom has their own neat trauma, are sufficiently concerned to hatch a scheme so absurd you expect the screen to wilt with embarrassment.

Take some Dramamine and listen carefully. Will has been writing letters to the three abstract concepts that he blames for all his (and all the world’s) misery: Time, Death and Love. The Norton-Winslet-Peña axis hire actors to play these concepts and . . . Well, what exactly?

Initially we get the sense that, genuinely concerned for their chum, they hope to coax him round to an accommodation with grief. As the film progresses, however, they decide to exploit his interactions with the actors to prove that he is insane and thus wrest executive control from his sad wee hands. So, they start out barmy and nice. Somewhere along the line they become barmy and appalling.

This is one of those bafflingly overstaffed projects that can’t open a door without revealing a multiple Oscar nominee. Helen Mirren plays Death in a Grateful Dead T-shirt that, alas, I’ve failed to avoid mentioning. Keira Knightley blubs her way through Love. Young Jacob Latimore gets a break as Time. Naomie Harris is elsewhere.

Oh, the things they have to do. Oh, the things they have to say. “It wasn’t that I felt love, it was that I felt like I had become love,” Norton intones, while looking nervously for the exit. Mirren is such a conspicuous good sport you half expect her to turn up in the foyer at the close and take us all bowling. Smith does a face that suggests “indigestion” rather than “distress”.

David Frankel, director of The Devil Wears Prada, makes it all look very pretty and the cast do appear to be putting in an effort. Should we fret about something so insignificant? Yes, we should be annoyed. There's a wretched lie at the heart of this ghastly, ghastly film. The script argues that our most debilitating crises can be alleviated by repeating the sort of facetious platitudes that used to appear slapped across pictures of kittens on posters in Woolworths.

I would have more respect for a film that argued for a traditional religion such as Islam or Orthodox Judaism. To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski, say what you like about the tenets of Roman Catholicism, at least it's an ethos. This is just pick-and-mix ideological manure.

Oh well. Maybe the writer is on to something. His philosophy got this film made. That is something like a miracle.