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67Crossing Over is so eager to go for the emotional jugular that it never quite forges an enlightening point of view.
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Tied together with endless, flattening shots of L.A.'s cloverleaf freeways, Crossing Over is often simplistic and occasionally lugubrious, but it's rarely boring.
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63Kramer takes on a hot, unwieldy topic in Crossing Over -- the dream that immigrants have of U.S. citizenship and the nightmare of achieving it, especially with shortcuts. I'm sure Kramer will be picked to pieces for trying something while Hollywood crap climbs the box office ladder. There are all kinds of nightmares.
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63Some of these stories are fascinating and some are heartbreaking, but together they seem too contrived.
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63Harrison Ford - in his best role in years - and Cliff Curtis are the main reasons to see the film.
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63Enough things in Crossing Over work to keep the film from becoming a bore, but this is a definite step down from Kramer's past efforts, "The Cooler" and "Running Scared."
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58Crossing Over is not a success but make no mistake: There is great drama to be found in these streets.
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50The movie expresses honest concern for the plight of so many newcomers to America, legal or illegal. What it lacks is moment-to-moment credibility.
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50Crossing Over is a result of the sledgehammer approach writer-director Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, The Cooler) takes to his subject matter -- the same heavy-handed tactics that earned "Crash" three Oscars.
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50There is undoubtedly a good movie in the varied experiences of American newcomers. But it would need to involve sagas more urgent and more original.
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50If Crossing Over is less self-congratulatory than "Crash" about confronting its designated problem, it's just as inept at dramatizing the complex ways that problem unites and divides us. Here every cause is something you can wear around your neck.
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50The controversial subject matter will undoubtedly hit close to home for many people, but a few genuinely uncomfortable scenes will either provoke the audience into serious thought or just cause them to leave the theater angry.
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50Had Crossing Over chosen to tell one of them well, rather than seven badly, it would have made for a fine movie. Instead, all we get is a mess of good liberal intentions loosely anchored to a mass of pure Hollywood hokum.
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50Some will win and some will lose their encounters with unbending American bureaucracy, but all deserve better, which should leave viewers eager for an even-handed take on this issue crossing over into disappointment.
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50A disappointing picture that suffers from all manner of ills: Both the direction and the dialogue are stiff and awkward, and Kramer -- who also wrote the script -- crams too many not-believable-enough subplots into the movie's "Crash"-style construction. Yet Crossing Over is an interesting failure.
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50A busy, Crash-like complex of LA stories, each hammering home the injustice of our immigration law.
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42For all the bludgeoning insistence of Kramer's contrived plots and blunt direction, there's not much conviction to the outrage.
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40Writer-director Wayne Kramer adds what could be called mainstream threads to his messy script, but the result is simplistic across the board.
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40Being over-stuffed and heavy-handed are not even Crossing Over's biggest problems. That dubious honour goes to an absolute failure to address its nominal subject-matter in any meaningful way.
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40The latticework of social meaning that makes up Crossing Over is ultimately a flimsy structure that pays lip service to liberal values while only occasionally inventing anything of dramatic significance.
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40If Mr. Kramer's outrage felt honest, his film would be easier to respect. But time and again, he undermines his own righteousness by pumping up the violence and stripping down his talent.
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38Here comes Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over, a bid to create the "Crash" of illegal-immigration dramas.
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The film plays like a garish melodrama that reproduces the most ham-fisted, polemical aspects of "Crash."
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30There are a bunch of other clunky immigrant subplots (the Jews get a comic one, the Turks a scary one), but it isn't until the massacre–cum–civics tutorial in the liquor store that Crossing Over crosses into the mythic realm of camp. What a waste. I still say it's better than "Crash," though.
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And so it goes, with Kramer--who doesn't really seem to like people very much--failing to muster even the superficial empathy the makers of the similarly programmatic "The Visitor" and "Rendition" showed toward their own cardboard-cutout imperiled illegals.
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30The way the picture dwells almost exclusively on cinematically exploitable elements -- gangbanger crime, prostitution, honor killing, terrorism paranoia -- gives it a sordid patina that even the classy, able thesps can't offset.
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30As Crossing Over makes its patronizing points, by way of two-dimensional characters and billboarded plot points, it recalls other, better movies that dealt with the same subjects far more deftly.
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25A mess.
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20All of its plot threads are equally dreadworthy.
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10Forced, heavy-handed and overdone, it's a pretend serious film that offers crass manipulation in the place where honesty is supposed to be.
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10Wayne Kramer's interlocking saga of immigration in 21st-century America definitely crosses over, from workaday mediocrity to distinctive dreadfulness.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 4
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Mixed: 0 out of 4
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Negative: 1 out of 4
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7
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JayH.6A bit too dramatic but it is a sincere effort. The entire cast is good. It doesn't always convince however. Decent but nothing outstanding.
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PaulN.8