Collateral Beauty

Will Smith headlines this seasonal New York tale, but in dramatic terms, he's sidelined in the role of ad executive Howard who is grieving over the loss of his young daughter. He says little and naturally smiles little, which is a hindrance when those pearly whites are worth a million dollars at the box office. Howard's colleagues and so-called friends (Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Peña) decide it's time to intervene and employ actors, played by Keira Knightley, Jacob Latimore and Helen Mirren (hamming it up for a few laughs), to be the spirits of Love, Time and Death respectively and take turns confronting him to debate their virtues. Director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) is pitching this as a sort of variation on A Christmas Carol but unlike other re-workings (It's a Wonderful Life, for example), the antihero remains a mysterious shadow of a man, partly to safeguard a final twist. That makes it impossible to invest emotionally in his plight and even those conversations designed to intellectualise his loss are teeth-grittingly platitudinous. Mirren bizarrely states that "Nothing's ever really dead if you look at it right", but the stupefying effect of scenes like that prove otherwise.