ICE agents Max Brogan (Harrison Ford) and Hamid Baraheri (Cliff Curtis) are ICE catch Mireya Sanchez (Alice Braga) during a raid. High school student Taslima Jahangir from Bangladesh gets caught up after doing a presentation favorable to the 9/11 hijackers. Claire Sheperd (Alice Eve) is an aspiring actress from Australia without a green card. Her friend Gavin Kossef (Jim Sturgess) is a musician from the UK. She is coerced into sex with immigration officer Cole Frankel (Ray Liotta). He's married to immigration lawyer Denise (Ashley Judd).

This is trying very hard to be Crash with illegal immigration. I would rather have concentrated on one story. The problem is that it tries too hard. It even has a couple of white illegals. Some are more compelling stories than others. Worst, it does not add up to something good. Wayne Kramer is not good enough to tackle this important issue.

It's really surprising (for me) to read, that Kramers (director/writer) previous efforts as a writer, were Mindhunters and Running Scared (which he also directed). Both movies, that are more in the action genre and wouldn't really leave with the feeling that the guy who made those movies, could/would be able to make a drama, that can be compared to Traffic and Crash.

Even if you don't feel it lives up to those two (which I feel too),it's still a pretty good movie. You have great actors and there is no holding back any punches. At times it gets really political (and how couldn't it go that way),although sometimes you'd wish even more involvement or that he would shed more light into some segments ... but then again, the movie might have felt too long if he did.

As it is, this is a rock solid drama, about migration (immigration) and many other things in the US.

A recent movie, "Traffic," had a name star in the lead -- Michael Douglas -- and was a nearly seamless blend of a couple of related stories about heroin, where it comes from and how it gets here. The film was neatly done. There were competent actors in relatively minor pats -- Benjamin Bratt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Benicio Del Toro, Miguel Ferrer, and the like. The segments dealt with a city in Ohio (photographed in a dismal blue),Mexico (sun-baked yellow),and Los Angeles (noon-bright). It was a nicely done docudrama in which the personal mingled with the strictly economic. Following on the success of "Traffic" was "Syriana," which attempted a similar structure and was put together by some of the same talents. It was about the oil industry and was less successful, except in showing us that the deserts of some Middle Eastern countries look less like Lawrence of Arabia territory and more like Las Vegas.

"Crossing Over" is another stab at the same structure, only this time the social issue addressed is immigration, legal and otherwise. The name star is Harrison Ford, and minor roles are filled by Ashley Judd, Ray Liotta, and other faces, some less familiar than others.

Although the stories are photographed similarly, there's no problem following the separate threads because the problems with immigration involve groups that are visibly separate from one another -- Iranian, Mexican, Japanese, and Australian. Maybe other snippets that I missed.

It's probably a better movie that "Syriana" but less polished than the holotypic "Traffic." Drugs bind everyone together in an interdependent network, while immigration problems divide them into competing groups. The film seems less of a whole because of that.

Almost as if in compensation for that weakness, the comment on our everyday lives is more striking. Junkies may perk up their ears at the flow chart for heroin but most of the rest of us will just shake our heads and go tsk tsk. Well, what else are we going to do? Opiates have been with us for years.

But illegal immigration -- now, that's a hot button issue. We're ALL involved today. We're tearing our hair out over "undocumented aliens." They're coming here as scofflaws, taking our jobs, filling up our emergency rooms, ignoring civic responsibilities, not paying taxes but taking advantage of our welfare services, elbowing us out of our own libraries and holding up 7/11s and all the rest of the stereotype.

But this movie doesn't pander to the xenophobes among us. A high-school girl, a legal citizen of Iranian extraction, covers her head at school and reads a paper in which she argues that the jihadists on 9/11 -- whatever else they may have been -- were not the "cowards" they're so often called. She doesn't condone what they did but claims that at least they forced the United States to pay attention to the plight of Moslems in places like Palestine and the Gaza strip. She acts defiant, stupidly. She's ridiculed by her class, yanked out of school, has her computer scanned by ICE, and winds up in a detention center for young girls. (Saying something similar -- challenging the use of the word "cowards" -- was what got Bill Maher kicked off network television.) What does this little story do for our hot buttons? The least that can be said for it is that it makes us think twice about "freedom of speech", and, in my humble opinion, anything that prompts us to think before forming judgments is a moral thing.

I described it before as a "docudrama," which isn't quite accurate because the stories are fictional, as far as I know. Still, it's educational in a way that documentaries are educational. We're up in arms about "anchor babies". Most of us, judging from what I've read on the internet, assume that when an illegal couple has a baby in the US, not only is the infant a citizen but somehow, magically, the parents too become citizens. (Do they rush across the Rio Grande at the last minute, gushing amniotic fluid?) The movie reminds us that, though the neonate is a citizen, the parents are still here illegally and subject to deportation. When the baby is twenty-one years old, he or she can petition to have his or her parents brought to this country, though he or she may not succeed for one reason or another. (I'm being so politically correct it's making me woozy.)

It's not a bad story from the fictional perspective, and its instructive value makes it worth a watch.