Changing Lanes

Two men (Ben Affleck and Samuel Jackson) from opposite sides of the socio-economic divide have their fates thrown together by a simple fender bender. Affleck plays a Yuppie lawyer wrestling with his conscience, while Jackson is a beaten down, recovering alcoholic insurance salesman trying to hold his family together. The filmmakers try to be even handed--neither man is a saint or a villain--but the end result is that we end up not caring much about either of them. Not smart enough to be a morality play, nor exciting enough to be a thriller, the movie languishes in the dead zone of movies whose creators were not quite sure what they were after.