Crossing Over

This egregious, vaguely Altmanesque moral panic multi-strander marks a case of diminishing returns for director Wayne Kramer (‘Running Scared’, ‘The Cooler’). It views like a neurotic instructional video for immigration etiquette in the US, with the numerous interweaving tales all culminating in bathetic, ‘oh the humanity!’-type denouements that don’t make for particularly engaging ‘political’ cinema. In the mix we’ve got an Australian soap star with visa troubles, sleazy green card bigwig Ray Liotta , solemn and conflicted immigration enforcement officer Harrison Ford and a young Asian teen being indicted by the Feds for her history essay on the 9/11 attackers. Any one of these stories, if properly fleshed out and shorn of contrivance, would have made for a perfectly serviceable film. Instead, we have lots of hysterical little bits of nothing much.