Crossing Over

No, Crossing Over is not about that psychic dude who pretends to field messages from your dead relatives, although it is similarly exploitative and disingenuous. Nor is it about making headway with a heretofore unfamiliar demographic, although it does crassly stock up on token ethnic underdogs and reduce them all to the lowest common denominator. (The ensemble also includes Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta, Cliff Curtis and Ashley Judd, each deserving better.) In fact, this cheap, clenched melodrama from writer-director Wayne Kramer (also of The Cooler) is a fractured saga of immigration and naturalization, in the same discursive way that Traffic was a saga of drugs and Crash and Babel were sagas of pretty much the same basic stuff as this but from different perspectives. Look at all the perspectives! It just goes to show how many ways we have of stirring the melting pot. And the box-office cash-register till.