Michael LownCrossing Over (2009)
March 28th 2010 14:10
How to start off the new review section of Wag the Film? Lawrence of Arabia? Citizen Kane? Nope, that's way too easy. Instead, I'll look back on the near-straight-to-dvd flop Crossing Over, starring Harrrison Ford, written/directed by Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), and brought to you from the good folks over at the Weinstein Company.
Whenever you have to judge the overall quality of a film, it's sometimes a smart idea to look at it's production details as a good indicator. Crossing Over is a fine example: shot all the way back in '07, this film didn't see a theatrical release until the Febraury '09, where it was unleased into enough theaters for it not to be considered a straight-to-video release when it hit into DVD stands (needless to say its box office receipts were unimpressive). Read even further into its production and you will find even worse indicators. Turns out there was a post-production over in film between director and producers. Spoiler alert: the producers won in the end and a good twenty minutes were ripped out. When an entire subplot involving a character played by Sean Penn is chopped out, you know there's a big stink bomb of a movie waiting around the corner.
With all this talk on the film, you're probably wondering what this whole mess is all about. Simple: take the movie Crash and cross out the work racism with illegal immigration and you've pretty much got Crossing Over (they even drag Crash Mark Isham into this mess). Want a little more? Sure. Like Crash, this subject over illegal immigration is told through multiple storylines.
The first deals with immigration officer Max Brogan (Harrison Ford). During a routine reid on a sweatshop, he runs across an Mexican immigrant (Alice Braga, good in movies like City of God and Redbelt, completely wasted here). Before she is deported, she begs him to look after her son. At first he refuses, but later sympathesizes with her, finds her boy, and sends him to his grandparents in Mexico, only to find out that his mother has tried to cross the border again to find him. What should have been the emotional crux of the story, this storyline is later ignore by the first-half-hour of the film, only to be replace with a more trashy (re: commericial) subplot of a murder that involves Brogan's partner (Cliff Curtis, a strong character actor who is too-often wasted in these kind of roles).
Another subplot (and easily the most exploitive, which is saying a lot for this film), involves the plight of an Australian immigrant (Alice Eve, who has the gift of having a great ass with little screen presence), with big dreams of celebrity superstardom, but needs to get legal first. With all of her options falling to the ground, she is resorted to becoming the sex slave of a horny immigration worker (Ray Liotta, who looks like he just took a shot of botox before the cameras started to roll).
This, for obvious reasons, doesn't sit well with her boyfriend (Jim Sturgess), a wannabe-muscision also on a quest to get legal. How does he go about this? Simple, pretending to be a jewish rabbi despite the fact that he is an atheist, in a storyline so silly it should've ended up in an Adam Sandler movie (hey, at least it'd be better than You Don't Mess with the Zohan). Nor should this sit well for his wife, an immigration defense attorney (Ashley Judd), but she's too busy trying to stop some Muslim girl from deportation to really give a shit.
It's not too hard to understand the problems of this film. First off, too many storylines, none of which are particularily interesting (the fact that I completely forgot to mention another subplot involving a Korean immigrant getting mixed up in crime tells how pointless it is to the plot). All the acting is decent, with the expection of Ford. If anyone was always curious as to what it means to be "sleepwalking through a performance," you need not look no further, with Ford mumbling through all his dialouge with a clear expression of how little he gives a shit about what is going on around him, an expression we've seen too much on him in films this decade without the word Indiana in it.
Director Kramer himself turns out to be a problem. While his heart seems to be in the right place (being an immigrant himself), but he lacks any subtlely to make the story work. Whether this comes out visually (how do we know that Ashley Judd cares deeply for orphans and immigrants? She carries around a big-ass neckless of the African continent everywhere she goes), or through storytelling, with the dialouge ranging from melodramatic to downright preachy. It also doesn't help that Kramer seems piticularily clueless as to how to make any of the story connect together, an essential quality when it comes to these multi-layered films. Good example? A main character stumbles into some grocery store in Koreatown for no other reason than to have a shoot-out with another main character. That's just bad writing, Mr. Kramer.
Throw in other laps of logic (one character writes a high school paper that sympathesizes with the 9/11 hijackers, only to have to nerve to be shocked when she is hated by her schoolmates and as the FBI knocking at her door), and Crossing Over becomes the defination of a well-intentioned mess. That being said, the movie isn't entirely hopeless. The score from Isham and the visuals of DoP James Whitaker are both solid, and and I'd be lying to you if this film didn't have my full intention throughout it's runtime. Unfortunately, Crossing Over is exactly the kind of film that you'd expect from its production history.
[Side Note: Is it just me or is Wayne Kramer a Lost-fan? I mean the hints range from small (subplot involving Koreans, interwining storylines, self-indulgent attitude) to large (the aussie hottie is named Claire Shepherd). Maybe I'm just reading into things, but its seems like Kramer had some Lost marathon on DVD while churning out the first draft]
[Another Side Note: Look out for other strong character actors Michael Cudlitz (TV's Southland) and Lizzy Caplan (Cloverfield) in brief appearances]
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