Collateral Beauty : Actually, the trailer is not misleading, but what about the charges?

A lot of people are complaining that this film is misleadingly marketed as a spiritual fantasy film because according to them it is not what it claims to be. Maybe these people haven't seen the movie because it is revealed in a final twist that Keira Knightley, Jacob Lattimore, and Helen Mirren actually are Love, Time, and Death. My question is why are these presumably benign supernatural beings charging $20,000 each for their services?

Because the writing is effed.

Because the story is absurd and the twist is even worse.

Agreed. Poeple weren't paying attention. Love actually approached Nortan's character to lead him to the other "actors". Love helped Norton's character and the rest his other coworkers. Death approaches his wife in the flashback.




I am the Alpha and the Omoxus The Omoxus and the Omega

It wasn't spelled out exactly. i think you could read meanings into it, in that keira as love was against it, while the other two weren't and that says something about them as the concepts. or maybe they were testing the resolve of ed, kate and mike, to see if they were really willing to do anything to help their friend, something like that.

I think they went into it trying to help their friend Howard, but ended up each being helped themselves (For example, Kate's character and Time helping her since her days of being able to have a child naturally are slowly ticking away. He helped her to see that what makes someone a mother doesn't necessarily have to do with who birthed you. You can adopt, you can foster, etc.)

no doubt. i was actually wondering if they were just there to help the others and helping howard was just a bonus they threw in.

I was wondering that too. Perhaps they had to coordinate things.

I am the Alpha and the Omoxus The Omoxus and the Omega

Right, and Love helped Whit show his love for his daughter. Death helped Simon realize that he needed to tell his wife that he had terminal cancer. I agree with omoxus that the whole sequence of events was set in motion by Love when she initially approached Whit. The goal was to help not only Howard, but also Whit, Simon, and Claire.

The film is still badly directed, acted, and written-all the basic tenets of film-making. And that the friends' plan from the beginning was to trick Will Smith for their own benefit from the get-go still makes them horrible people.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

I don't think that the friends were horrible people. Yes, they were looking out for their own self interest to some extent. But they were also trying to save dozens of jobs. The company was about to go under because Howard was essentially contributing nothing. In one sense, it was Howard who was the most selfish. After all, most people who lose a young child are able to carry-on with their job, at least after two years have gone by. The friends had already tried every other solution that they could think of for two years and nothing worked. Howard refused to even discuss the matter. So he had his friends backed into a corner where they felt they had no other alternative. At this point, Love, Time, and Death decided to step in and clean up the mess that these humans had gotten themselves into. They executed their plan by pretending to be actors who could help Howard's friends trick him.

They had to charge for their services or the friends would have been suspicious. Why would actors do what they were asking for nothing? It was part of the ruse.

Well, they had to play it off so that they could help. They couldn't just randomly go up to these 3 people to help them for no reason. Otherwise, they would react the same way Harold reacted. ( in the end, I think it was mostly his wife who helped him.)
Maybe they took the 20,000 dollars to make it hurt because they saw these 3 as jerks with good intentions.

The way the twist is revealed in the early draft of the script is better. Norton, Winslet. and Pena hired an investigator to take pictures of Smith talking to these actors playing Love, Time, and Death and then have them digitally removed to prove to the board that he's crazy. But turns out she doesn't have to photoshop them out at all because she later finds out those actors are already invisible in the pictures. . So Norton, Winslet, and Pena are just as surprised when they find out during the meeting. And Smith was supposed to be very angry they'd fooled him.

The movie might have been slightly better if it had taken a different appraoch. Instead, they they went with the sappy-Christmas-movie route.

That would have been a far better twist.

I agree. I like that better.

Funny thing is, the current version did well with test audiences.


I am the Alpha and the Omoxus The Omoxus and the Omega