Movie review: 'Crossing Over'
Crossing Over
2 stars
Written and directed by Wayne Kramer
Starring Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta, Ashley Judd, Jim Sturgess, Cliff Curtis, Alice Eve, Alice Braga, Summer Bishil, Justin Chon
Watching “Crossing Over,” directed by Wayne Kramer, you can’t help but compare it to “Crash.” Like the Paul Haggis movie, it’s set in L.A., stars an ensemble cast and interweaves story lines in which personalities and cultures clash. Unlike “Crash,” though, “Crossing Over” probably won’t be winning any Oscars.
Harrison Ford plays a conscientious immigration officer who raids garment factories and then feels bad for the people he buses out.
Ray Liotta is a cubicle drone who approves green cards for the government, a power he decides to abuse when he runs into a beautiful Aussie (Alice Eve) who will do anything (read: sleep with creepy cubicle drones) to become a legally working actress in Hollywood. His wife (Ashley Judd) is a defense immigration lawyer, whose clients include a Muslim teenager (Summer Bishil) who gets shipped back to Bangladesh when an essay she writes about 9/11 puts the FBI up in arms.
This is only a fraction of the stories that get shoehorned into this well-meaning but heavy-handed melodrama. Kramer wants to be sure you get the message: America is a place where dreams are made, but it’s also a place where dreams are snuffed and replaced with effed-up nightmares, courtesy of the government.
Kramer aims high, and he does manage to stir up empathy for some of these people’s plights. Ironically, the most heartfelt character is not the Mexican immigrant worker, but the scruffy British musician (Jim Sturgess) who desperately tries to obtain legal status through a job at a Jewish day school — even though he’s an Atheist Jew. The film bristles with earnest intentions, but it’s ultimately too broad, the stories too contrived and the characters too thin to evoke much more than heartstring-tugging, Hallmark card emotions.
