Crossing Over

[SiliasRuby]

A review I found....so funny.

One of the best actors of all time, Sean Penn, was once in Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over. The story behind why he's no longer in the film reportedly goes that he saw the final product and disapproved of a subplot involving an Iranian honor killing. Now, having seen the final film, I can tell you that this is no small subplot. It's not something he might have easily missed with even one read of the screenplay or asking someone on set, "Hey, what's this movie about?" So, we have two possibilities – either he didn't read the whole screenplay and ignored several of his colleague's major roles in the film or he's lying. Personally, I think it's the latter. I think he saw the final product and knew it would be the worst film on his resume (yes, worse than Shanghai Surprise) and convinced someone to cut him out. Too bad Harrison Ford couldn't have been so proactive.

Nothing makes me angrier than movies that use real-world subjects to manipulate their audience into thinking they're saying something important. Filmmakers who use the pain that people feel outside of the movie theater to craft it into melodrama without taking the concern to do it genuinely are reprehensible. It's not that actual issues shouldn't be used in film but they need to be treated believably and not just as shallow tools by someone trying to pull your heartstrings. By the end of Crossing Over, a film that purports to tell the story of immigration in the United States in the '00s, I was so angry that I was grinding my teeth and I could feel my skin crawl. An early contender for the worst film of the year, Crossing Over is a completely disingenuous slice of awful storytelling, one-note performances, and manipulative melodrama that should not only not be seen, it should be boycotted.

Where do I start? With the poor girl (Summer Bishil) watching her family torn apart because she dared to suggest that we should try to understand the attackers of 9/11? With Immigration Officer Max Brogan (Harrison Ford) and his journey to find the son of a young mother (Alice Braga) he sent back to Mexico? How about Max's partner Hamid (Cliff Curtis) who struggles as his sister (Melody Khaze) becomes too American for his family's approval? She's the one found murdered mere days before her father is going to be naturalized in a ceremony that you know is going to be overblown and melodramatic but you have no idea the depths Kramer is willing to sink to.

Oh, we're not done with the immigrant archetypes. There's the young man (Jim Sturgess) who is trying to pass himself off as a Jewish musician to get residency, a Korean teenager (Justin Chon) tempted by his gangster friends, and, last but not least, the love triangle of Claire (Alice Eve), Denise (Ashley Judd), and Cole (Ray Liotta). Claire is a struggling Australian actress looking for a green card who just happens to run into (literally) Cole, an immigration official who agrees to give the sexy young lady what she needs in return for constant sexual favors. Cole is married to Denise, who happens to be (the movie could have been called "Happens To Be") an immigration defense lawyer herself working on both the case of an adorable African child who can't find a home and the Muslim girl about to be deported. And the circle of fake life is complete.

Actually, Crossing Over isn't as much a circle as a web of lies. Every character is related to another in the forced way that would make a ten-year-old yell "Come on!" If a writing student turned this script in for a class, he would be kicked out of school. The film is full of scream-at-the-screen moments. Where do I begin? The murder confession during a naturalization ceremony, the manipulative use of crying children directed so over-the-top that they become cartoonish, the gratuitous nudity that turns Claire into nothing more than a sex object, the unreasonable end to Denise's arc with the African child, or the shoot-out in which a character stops firing to give a speech about the pride of the immigrant? All of these elements (and several more at that) contribute to the pain

Imagine an entire movie of just the worst, most on-the-nose moments of Crash. At one point, a character turns to another, as the National Anthem plays in the background, and says, "In this country, we call that murder... cold, blooded murder." Murder of common sense, maybe. Murder of good taste. Murder of screenwriting. Murder of cinema. Don't let them get away with it.