Customer Reviews

Crossing Over

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It's been a long time since a movie surprised me like "Crossing Over". I'll be honest, I didn't know much about this movie, other than it starred one of my favorite actors, Harrison Ford, and that it tackled the immigration issue. I expected a decent movie and Ford doing his usual great performance, but what I found was a riveting moving drama with superb acting from a very talented ensemble cast! What a fantastic movie and one I HIGHLY recommend. As I watched this movie, I was reminded of other ensemble movies with weaving story lines such as "Magnolia" and "Traffic". I consider myself a serious movie buff and not an easy critic but this movie really won me over and I consider it one of the best movies I've seen in quite a while. Don't miss this one!!

This is realism at its best! With immigration issues more current than ever this movie addresses the growing immigration and the often sad human destinies involved - not only among the immigrants but also among the very government agencies and bodies ment to manage the situation.

Having outgrown Harrison Ford movies (typecast for decades) as I left my teenage years my expectations were very moderate as I entered the theatre - did I turn out to be wrong again!

Harrison Ford delivers a solid performance but the movie is so much more than him - in fact most of the other characters are delivering excellent performances - and refreshingly all are depicted in a shade of grey - rather than black and white as we have come accustomed to from Hollywood for decades. It brings back sweet memories of American Beauty in this department.... in itself something I for one have been longing for for a long time.

The storyline resembles another excellent movie, Crash, in its shifting between multiple stories which in the end turn out to be intertwined and Grand Torino in its coverage of the immigration issue but with far superior acting and plot. In fact particularly the acting of the immigrants were excellent and far superior to the appauling Vietnamese actors in Grand Torino.

At times a bit depressing but also heartwarming and certainly a must see movie.

This movie is an extremely thoughtful comment on the immigration issues facing this country today. With skillful directing, this movie takes us inside the lives of U.S. Immigration agents and several legal and illegal immigrants, telling each of their stories from a unique perspective. Harrison Ford takes a nice turn as a conflicted immigration agent torn between duty and morality, who sees each immigration story as unique and shows more heart than most of his fellow officers. What I find most interesting is that this almost semi-documentary script gives us an intimate look into the lives of those on all sides of the immigration debate, and shows us why we need to be a bit more tolerant in our attitudes on a case-by-case basis. The movie also paints a beautiful picture of the cultural diversity of those who come to this country, and how far some are willing to go in order to remain here. It also reminds us what American citizenship often means to those who weren't born here. It is a very thought-provoking movie.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I like to think that if you gave me a couple of days, a few sandwiches and sodas, a Flip UltraHD Camcorder, 120 Minutes (Black) plus the participation of Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd, Ray Liotta, Alice Braga, Jim Sturgess, Alice Eve, Summer Bishil and a talented ensemble, I could make a movie that could gross more than the $500,000 in North American box office receipts generated by CROSSING OVER.

The movie itself is pretty watchable and occasionally thought-provoking. It's got a quality cast and great production values. But ultimately it comes across as a paint-by-numbers message movie that tries to check all the boxes and connect all the dots in ways that muddle and mix-up the message. Of course, that may be the point. But the questions the movie asks ultimately asks could provoke just as much discussion written on cards in a board game. Is it better to sleep with an INS agent to get your green card? Or to fake religious devotion and persecution? Did you come to America because you believe in its freedoms and ideals? Once here, would you risk deportation by engaging in the free speech you had heard so much about?

Similarities to movies such as BABEL, TRAFFIC, CRASH. FAST FOOD NATION and even GRAN TORINO echo throughout. And clearly something went wrong in the execution and/or marketing of this movie. It was shot in 2007 and only released in 2009, with scenes including Sean Penn edited out along the way.

If you're not in the mood for a board game, there are worse things to do than watching and pondering the questions posed in CROSSING OVER.

CROSSING OVER reminds me of Babel but in a more down to earth way. With 5 intersecting storylines colliding and converging in this piece, it's no easy task to juggle them all, and director Wayne Kramer does an excellent job. It's hard to not compare this to other films of similar ilk, but CROSSING OVER definitely stands on its own. Throw in a bit of Steve Soderbergh's Traffic as well - it must be the LA heat and Mexican border! - and you have a gritty if sobering drama to watch.

This is the kind of role that Harrison Ford excels in. He's serious as an immigration agent but appropriately so. The entire cast works very well - from Ashley Judd to Ray Liotta to Jim Sturgess to Cliff Curtis and blonde Aussie newcomer? Alice Eve - who looks like Reese Witherspoon stacked on a supermodel's body.

The film weaves in a little Hollywood police thriller riff - unlike Babel or even Traffic - which grounds CROSSING OVER in a certain formula - and somehow, justice gets served Hollywood style at the end. But the larger issues and harsher realities of being American, seeking identity and the world today, still come across by the film's open ended conclusion.

PS - SEAN PENN DOES NOT APPEAR IN THIS FILM. THIS IS A MISTAKE IN THE CREDITS.

This movie should have used a Pakistani or Arab family to depict the backwardness of honor killings instead of an Iranian family. It would have been more accurate, if nothing esle. Iranians, although mainly muslim, have a lot less zeal when it comes to these matters than thsoe of the above-mentioned.
The movie, however, does present the human side of some of today's issues that the western and american societies are dealing with.
One thing is for sure: The so called conseravtives will hate this movie like they did Crash.

I always like it when a movie exceeds my expectations. Crossing Over was a lot better than I thought it would be. I don't remember this movie in the theaters so it kind-of slipped under the radar. The plot was good and the A-list actors did a great job.

Ashley Judd's plastic surgery was a bit disturbing because one eyebrow is about 1/2" higher than the other one. She needs to get that fixed. It's creepy...

Alice Eve was quite stunning and her part was believable and well played.

I viewed Crossing Over in 2008 as part of a test audience. In an age of popcorn action films and dopey comedies, I found the film to be very moving, human and tragic. It is well acted and directed and kept me interested in the many intertwining personal stories of immigration. Those of us living in So Cal equate the immigration issue as being solely Hispanic. But in Crossing Over, we see a broad spectrum encompassing many different nationalities and ethnicities.
I just skimmed through the DVD and was puzzled to see the Sean Penn sequence missing. WTF? While I missed the sequence, I wouldn't say that it was especially integral to the story. Penn plays a Border Patrol agent driving his truck in the rain when he swerves to avoid hitting a woman who appears out of nowhere. His truck goes rolling down the hillside. He awakes the next morning with a raging headache and stumbles upon the dead woman's body. It turns out she has been dead for a while and the woman he saw the night before was actually her apparition - she had been deported earlier in the film and was apparently on her way back to her son in LA. The sequence is less than ten minutes and Penn did not appear elsewhere in the film.
The Penn scene was replaced by some anonymous Border Patrol agent finding the dead woman's body. Much less moving and thoughtful. I thought it added a nice spiritual dimension to the film. What a brat for asking to be removed from the film. Is Hollywood really that spoiled?

Honestly, the only reason I rented this movie was because it starred Harrison Ford, and I expected the usual from him. It turned out to be so much more, and though Ford does a good job in his role, it was the ensemble cast that delivered incredibly moving performances.

Harrison Ford plays LA-based ICE agent Max Brogan whose job entails carrying out raids on places that employ undocumented aliens. In contrast to the demands of his job in pursuing and capturing the illegals, Max has a soft heart, following up on those illegals that he captures, especially in special cases. One such case involves a young Mexican alien [Alice Braga] who upon arrest, begs Max to check up on her young son, left in the care of a ruthless money-minded woman. Max refuses her, but later his conscience gets the better of him and he gets the boy back to his grandparents in Mexico, only to find the mother has gone missing.

This is one of the many story arcs that fuse this complex movie together, ala Crash, Traffic, Babel etc, but never throughout the movie, did I find this confusing. In fact, the story arcs all come together eventually, and the result is one gripping, emotionally powerful movie. There is the story of a Korean family where the eldest son is facing an identity crisis of sorts, soon to be naturalized yet not really appreciating its significance, much to his father's disappointment. There's the British Jewish guy who aspires to be a singer but finds himself desperate to get legal status, resorting to working in a Jewish school though he considers himself an atheist. There's the young Aussie actress [Alice Eve] hoping to make it big in America, but overstaying her visit, and finding herself at the mercy of an unscrupulous immigration adjudicator [Ray Liotta in yet another sleazeball role]. Ashley Judd [also playing Liotta's clueless wife] plays a compassionate immigration attorney who expends all her efforts helping those who need her services. One such person is 15-year-old Taslima, a Muslim girl [Summer Bishil of "Towelhead" delivering an emotionally gut-wrenching performance] who is taken into custody by the Feds because of a controversial paper she wrote in school about the 9/11 suicide bombers, a paper that sympathizes with the courage [though not the motives] of the killers. Being an undocumented alien, she and her undocumented parents face imminent deportation, leaving her family's future uncertain.

And finally, there's another story arc that deals with an Iranian American woman who faces the disapproval of her conservative family over her overly Westernized way of life. She also happens to be Max's partner's sister, and when she is found murdered, other facts come to light which causes Max to question his partner's motives.

It may appear that there are too many story arcs here to merit sufficient development or characterization, but I found the stories were well-told, the characters as played by the actors were credibly developed and portrayed and the stories eventually blended well together, engaging my attention on an intellectual and emotional level.There are no absolute happy endings here, but a mixture of pleasing outcomes together with the tragic. It is one of the most riveting, thought-provoking dramas I've seen this year.

An excellent story. A heart warming ending. I think the actors and actresses, especially Harrison Ford and Ashley Judd, performed well.