Film review: Crossing over

Published on Thursday 30 July 2009 19:12

CROSSING OVER (18) ** DIRECTED BY: WAYNE KRAMER STARRING: HARRISON FORD, RAY LIOTTA, ASHLEY JUDD, ALICE BRAGA

Another Homeland Security-inspired fret about the state of California's borders, this is at once ambitious, familiar in its multi-stranded storytelling, and suspect in its underlying politics. The star draw is Harrison Ford, credibly tired if conventionally heroic as a veteran cop investigating the human cost of illegal immigration; the tweak is that, among the pan-global supporting players scrabbling for green cards, we also get Caucasian faces involved in vaguely comparable visa-extension wrangles.

Kramer, who followed The Cooler with the dunderheaded Running Scared, remains a hard filmmaker to trust. For every provocative strand here, three more have been selected as gateways to cheap thrills. For a film keen to indict the potential for corruption in the naturalisation process, it comes to feel fairly tainted itself.