Movie Review: Crossing Over

Crossing Over (2009) 

Directed by Wayne Kramer 

Written by Wayne Kramer 

Starring Harrison Ford. Cliff Curtis, Ray Liotta, Ashley Judd

Release Date February 27th, 2009 

Published February 28th, 2009 

I'll give director Wayne Kramer this, he doesn't do things half way. His The Cooler thrived on heavy duty sexuality and grit. His follow-up, Running Scared was an adrenalized, hyper-caffeinated action movie that traded soully on style, zero substance. He's back at another extreme with his third feature; an immigration drama called Crossing Over.

With a great deal more substance than Running Scared, Crossing Over goes to another extreme as Kramer attempts to tell more stories than any one movie can stand.

Harrison Ford leads a wide ranging cast as immigration officer Max Brogan. With his partner Hamid (Cliff Curtis), Max leads raids on sweat shops and other underground locations where a large number of immigrants are centrally located. In one of these raids Max busts a young woman named Maria. She has a small child being cared for by a friend and she begs Max to find him and make sure he is cared for.

Meanwhile, running parallel to this story, all of which emanate in Los Angeles, for the most part, is the story of Gavin (Jim Sturgess) an Israeli immigrant on a visa soon to expire. Though an atheist, Gavin has managed to stay in the country posing as a religious scholar. He is in love with an Australian actress and immigrant named Claire. While his scam is vaguely plausible, she is going the fake documents route.

That path leads her to man named Cole Frankel (Ray Liotta) a bureaucrat at the immigration office who can help her. Help her he does after she agrees to have sex with him regularly for two months while he pushes her paperwork through. Cole is married to Denise (Ashley Judd) an immigration lawyer who defends people trying to stay in the country.

She is involved in the case of an Iranian family in which the teenage daughter incited a terror threat with a speech in her high school class saying she understood the 9/11 hijackers. Several more characters bounce in and out of frame but fail to register as well as the recognizable stars.

There is a worthy and moving drama somewhere in the morass of Crossing Over. Unfortunately, it's buried between too many subplots that crash (HA, Crash get it, multi-plotted Oscar winning drama crash) into one another but don't really connect beyond a very basic characteristic, all of them involve immigrants. For instance, one plot strand involves a Korean family who happen to be Max Brogan's regular dry cleaner.

Ashley Judd is a wonderful actress but her plot and that of the young Iranian girl are extraneous beyond belief. Kramer uses the girl basically to make a point about freedom of speech and thought and about post 9/11 paranoia. That's a powerful topic but it has little to do with the rest of the movie. Each of the character connections are tenuous at best, but Judd is beyond tenuous, she's in the movie for marquee value and little more.

Now, though I find fault with much of Crossing Over, especially Director Kramer's indulgent point making and lack of narrative focus, there are some powerful moments in Crossing Over. A standout is Ford's confrontation with his partner over a murder investigation. Ford's charisma and powerful emotional connections create and convey this scene beyond what it might be in the hands of a lesser actor.

Curtis himself has a powerful moment involving a convenience story robbery that gives him and the movie a moment of real depth and heart. Ray Liotta shines ever so briefly opposite Alice Eve's Claire in a scene where he drops the con man bit and reveals his true pain and hope for salvation. Her response is brave and shocking and if there were more to the plot behind it, it would have had some serious emotional repercussions.

Sadly, as happens throughout Crossing Over, good work gets lost amid the jumble of too many characters and too much plot.

Crossing Over is a valiant attempt to shine a light on the heartbreaking bureaucracy that is at the center of our immigration debate. It's a drama of great depth and emotion. Unfortunately, it's also indulgent bit of Oscar baiting aimed at capitalizing on the wave of big ensembles with big ideas. First it was Soderbergh's Traffic, all about drugs. Then it was Crash with racism. Now comes Crossing Over about immigration. The formula still has some juice but without the skill of a Soderbergh or a Haggis, the results are muted, reflecting the glory of those movies without earning any of its own.

Movie Review Running Scared

Running Scared (2006) 

Directed by Wayne Kramer 

Written Wayne Kramer

Starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Michael Cudlitz

Release Date February 24th, 2006

Published February 24th, 2006 

Violence for the sake of violence is not necessarily a hallmark of the thriller genre, unless you're Quentin Tarentino. The thriller Running Scared shows why most thrillers begin with a plot and then introduce only the violence necessary to tell the story. Overwhelmed by its blood, guts and body count, Running Scared devolves quickly from a fast paced, Tony Scott inspired thriller into a nonsensical horror film.

Making matters worse is the fact that the film was directed by the terrific young auteur Wayne Kramer who made such a great splash with his debut feature The Cooler. Running Scared is a major step backward for a director with more talent than what this film demonstrates.

Paul Walker stars as Joey Gazelle, a low level mobster with the simple task of getting rid of dirty guns. After a drug deal goes bad and Joey's boss (Johnny Messner) kills a dirty cop, it's up to Joey to get rid of the piece, a pearl handled snub nosed revolver. Joey however has another idea. In covering his own backside he has been taking the hot guns he was supposed to be disposing of and hiding them in his basement in case he needs them for leverage.

Things go bad for Joey when one of his son's friends, Oleg (Cameron Bright) takes the pearl handle gun from his stash and uses it to try and kill his abusive father (John Noble). The kid fails to kill his dad, who also happens to have mob connections, and is now on the streets with the hot piece. Joey must find the kid and retrieve the gun before his partners or the cops find it first.

The plot to Running Scared is a correlative to Robert Altman's brilliant but short lived anthology series Gun which aired briefly on ABC in the mid-nineties. That show followed the path of a gun from one owner to the next and detailed the havoc wreaked in its wake. In the case of the gun in Running Scared it's the lives of mobsters, dirty cops, gang bangers and one small child.

Where Gun was a brilliant verbose little drama, Running Scared is a brutally violent and utterly meaningless mess of a film. Director Wayne Kramer, who made the far more interesting film The Cooler with William H. Macy, directs Running Scared as if he wished he had made a horror film instead of a gritty thriller. Amping up the body count to cover up his lack of a compelling plot, Kramer is forced to rely on his sleepy eyed star to provide the film's driving force and oh what a mistake that is.

Paul Walker with his slacker, frat boy, surfer demeanor is an actor I find insufferable. Though he was not bad in the doggy adventure flick Eight Below he was out acted by a group of huskies. He was okay in the Fast and Furious films but those movies aren't exactly challenging cinema. Running Scared wants to be something a little more than a cheap violent thriller but because Walker's only emotions are confused and sleepy the film falls short of exciting or even playful.

Kramer's love of over the top violence and seeing my sexuality are not merely reminiscent of Tony Scott they are, in Running Scared, an outright ripoff. The whip pan camera work and overlapping film stocks are direct lifts from Scott's last two features Domino and Man On Fire. The ridiculous violence and high body count a nod to Scott's True Romance.

The only originality to seep into this dark, dystopian thriller is a hockey torture scene that has received heavy rotation in the films ad campaign. The look of the scene is clever and the torture is something I had never seen before. The scene is bloody and a bit of a nail biter. Unfortunately this good scene is rare amidst the misguided plot.

Running Scared is a bizarre little film. Violent to the point of parody, the film could qualify as a horror flick for the amount of blood and guts that get spilled but it's all in service of nothing. There is nothing you can take away from the film. This film's many influences, Tony Scott and Quentin Tarentino among others, are each far superior. While Scott's last two films, Domino and Man On Fire were not great films, Scott's direction is amped and always in service of a compelling if flawed plot.

Tarentino is, of course, the master of screen violence. Kill Bill 1 & 2 are the only films outside the horror film genre that can favorably compare body counts with Running Scared. The difference is the violence in Tarentino's masterpieces plays like a blood and guts symphony. Each bullet fired, each slice of a samurai blade a note in a grand opera of eloquent violence. In Running Scared the violence is simply for the sake of being violent. The style of the film, the grit, the color scheme and the whip pans, are merely showing off and never part of a coherent vision of how to present screen violence.

Violence for violence sake is okay in the horror genre, but it gets old quickly in the thriller or noir genre if it is not clearly in service of a good plot. The plot to Running Scared is simply not compelling enough to justify the blood, guts and body count. Pure viscerality can only get a movie so far before you need to give the audience something to really chew on.

Running Scared is a step backward for a director who showed eclectic style in his debut feature. Wayne Kramer's The Cooler was a hard R-rated character piece with an excellent cast that was directed with a purpose. The violence and sexuality of The Cooler worked with its compelling characters and unique plot not against them. There was simply more to that film than the action and flesh displayed.

Running Scared never stops moving which works for maybe 45 minutes but without great characters and not much of a plot the wheels eventually come off and the film flies off the rails.

Movie Review: 'Mindhunters'

Mindhunters (2005) 

Directed by Renny Harlin 

Written by Wayne Kramer, Kevin Brobdin, Ehren Kruger

Starring Val Kilmer, LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris

Release Date May 13th, 2005 

Published May 12th, 2005 

Mindhunters was a strange affair. The film was completed in 2002 but did not get released by the late Dimension Films until 2005. Why? Who knows, they probably realized the the stinker they had on their hands. After finally blowing the dust off this crusty little thriller with LL Cool J, Val Kilmer and Christian Slater, the newly, non-Weinstein regime at Dimension films finally dumped the film into theaters. Why they bothered with theaters instead of directing it to the video stores of 2005 where it belonged must have been some kind of contractual obligation. There is no other explanation for why garbage like Mindhunters ever made it to such a wide release.

LL Cool J is the star of Mindhunters-- he must have drawn the short straw-- as a shady cop invited to join a group of rookie FBI profilers on a training mission on a deserted island military base. Val Kilmer is the leader of this little band but his role is little more than a cameo.  And, yes, that is Christian Slater as one of the profilers of whose fate the trailer and commercials spoiled mightily and for no good reason whatsoever.

Joining Cool J at the head of the cast is Johnny Lee Miller as Lucas and Kathryn Morris from TV's Cold Case as Sara. They are joined by a group of other semi-recognizable early 2000s character actors including Eion Bailey then of TV's ER, Patricia Velasquez and Clifton Collins Jr. each of whom line up to be victims of the films serial killer as if they were camp counselors having sex at Crystal Lake. Canon fodder is a kind description of the roles played by Bailey, Velasquez and Collins. 

Essentially this little group is on the island to profile a fictional serial killer who is obsessed with time. The military base is set up as a small town with dummies standing in for real people. The profilers must locate the crime scenes, examine the fake dead bodies and assemble the clues that could lead them to the fictional killer. However, as they quickly find out from the death of one of their own, this serial killer is very real.

A search of the island shows the young profilers are either alone on the island, or not entirely thorough, thus leading to the obvious conclusion that one of them is in fact the killer. As the Rube Goldbergian murder devices unfold and remove one obvious victim after another, it is not hard to decipher which characters are going to survive and which is the killer. Morris, Miller and L.L Cool J all have main character powers so it's a safe bet that they are among the top suspects. 

This mess of horror film aesthetic and  thriller clichés attempts to fool audiences but not with clever plot twists and good character work.  No, director Renny Harlin's weapon of choice is utterly incomprehensible stupidity. The film was edited by Neil Farrell and Paul Martin Smith both of whom are wishing the Editors union accepted synonyms like the Directors union's well known Allen Smithee. Mindhunters seems as if it were assembled from different versions of the script each featuring different killers, victims, and survivors. This owes more to Harlin's baffling direction and Wayne Kramer's script than anything these poor and likely tortured editors did.

The mess extends to the acting and dialogue as well, as the confused cast bounds from one ridiculous setup to the next seemingly unaware of which version of the script they are acting from. LL Cool J, Johnny Lee Miller and the rest of the cast wander about looking at each other and seeming to say "No, I'm the killer!" "No I'm the killer!" "Are not!" "Am too!" and on and on throughout most of the final 30 minutes of the film. And somehow the killer still turns out to be easily predictable.

Mindhunters is a real shame because this is a very talented cast. Catherine Morris appeared to be a legit star on her TV show Cold Case in 2005. On that clever CBS crime procedural, her steely demeanor perfectly evoked her tough but vulnerable FBI Agent. In Mindhunters, however, Morris is thoroughly done in by a confused and disorienting script that may or may not have had her as both killer and victim at different points during filming.

LL Cool J, Christian Slater and Val Kilmer are shells of the actors who have flirted with stardom in the past. Kilmer we forget was once Batman, but he is far from even that flawed blockbuster in Mindhunters where apparently he owed the producers a favor. How else can you explain why he accepted this minor and entirely forgettable role. Mindhunters was sadly par for the course at the time for Slater who was coming off of his asleep-at-the-wheel lead role in Alone In The Dark. Mindhunters came at a time well before Mr Robot came around and brought Slater back to the respectable world of working actors. 

LL Cool J is at least an enjoyable star to head up and ham up Mindhunters and his is the only thing remarkable about the film. LL Cool , even in this terrible movie, had the charisma of an A-list celebrity and that helped him to outshine some of this deeply confusing script that I'm sure featured him as killer and victim and survivor and savior at different points during the production.

Johnny Lee Miller, Eion Bailey and Clifton Collins Jr. were terrific young actors in 2005 who had succeeded in the past with strong character work. Miller was once quite the rising star after leading man after starring with his then wife Angelina Jolie in Hackers and then gave a strong turn in the cult hit Trainspotting. Bailey made a good impression with a small role in Fight Club and a memorable performance in the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. And as for Collins, his best work was in front of him as he once earned genuine Oscar buzz for his supporting role in Capote opposite Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Watching this terrific cast suffer at the hands of director Renny Harlin is quite painful. All of this talent and  Harlin can do nothing with it but line them up on a formula horror thriller assembly line and eliminate them one by one until he's done picking names out of a hat to decide who lives and who is the killer. To call Renny Harlin a hack is far too simple. After once looking like a star director in the action genre, Harlin regressed as a filmmaker so much that he went from blockbusters to making movies that no longer see a theatrical release. Harlin hasn't seen one of his movies reach theaters in wide release since he made he vomited Exorcist The Beginning into theaters in 2004 to widespread derision and empty box office coffers.