ChryCo's Tough Life on the Streets: Once More, with Feeling

There's never really been a sporting time to beat up on Chrysler. From its early corporate days as the Big Three's Number Three through decades of bailouts and short sales, Hemis, Six-packs, Vipers, and faux Bentleys have been the only shining stars in this perenial automotive also-ran's universe.

So it is with ChryCo's much-hyped Super Bowl ad.

Black car, white cityscape, black doorman, white rapper.

It's supposed to knock everyone flat with the sober pain that is The Motor City and its PermaUnderdog automotive brand.

If MoCity hadn't done it to itself with decades of worker exploitation over-remedied with decades of union exploitation, and if ChryCo had bothered just once to try leading instead of following with every idea save for the minivan, we might care.

But instead we have the numerically-renamed Chrysler Sebring, victim of the same 2011 ugly stick beating as its corporate siblings, cruising the barren mean streets of Motown trying to drum-up post-traumatic stress sympathy to the beat of fellow post-traumatic stress pretender Marshall Mathers III.

Heroes who have been to hell and back are supposed to look like they've come back.