Entertainment in a Glance

Director:Wayne Kramer
Writer:Wayne Kramer (written by)
Release Date:26 February 2009 (Bahrain)
Genre:Drama

It's a powerful opening to a movie that rapidly fractures into a hodgepodge of interlocking subplots showcasing immigration woes. The film's structure is similar to that of "Crash," another overweening, high-style melodrama that reeked with self-importance.

You practically need a flow chart to keep all the players straight. Max's ICE partner, Hamid (Cliff Curtis), of Iranian descent, has a wealthy father who fled the 1979 revolution and is about to become a naturalized US citizen. His Goth-like daughter Zahra (Melody Khazae), however, has adopted what he views as loose Western ways – a real no-no.

A young Bangladeshi teenager, Taslima (Summer Bishil, from "Towelhead"), reads aloud to her class an essay sympathizing with the 9/11 attackers – another big no-no. Enter the FBI. Gavin (Jim Sturgess), a British illegal and nonpracticing Jew, gets a job at a Jewish day school on the condition that he not reveal his immigration status to anybody. His aspiring Aussie actress girlfriend Claire (Alice Eve) prostitutes herself with Cole (Ray Liotta), a green card application adjudicator, whose wife (Ashley Judd), is an immigration defense attorney battling for the rights of a young African girl.

Kramer somehow manages to connect all these dots, but the achievement is largely technical. It's like watching the working out of a theorem. He might have done better if he had focused on a single story – like, say, the Harrison Ford one, which at times resembles, to its disadvantage, the underrated "The Border" (1982), where Jack Nicholson played a border guard who becomes involved with a young Mexican mother.

But clearly Kramer, who is himself a naturalized US immigrant from South Africa, felt that more was better here. Each narrative is pitched for maximum emotional effect, but this tactic soon becomes exhausting. When a story line threatens to become powerful, such as the ones involving Taslima or Claire, Kramer invariably cuts away to more mundane melodramatics, especially those involving a Korean teenager (Justin Chon) pressured into joining a gang.

Harrison Ford is the only marquee name here, and his tiredness as the ICE agent seems bone-deep. His performance might seem more impressive if his snarly world-weariness were not already familiar to us from his last 20 movies. Ford hasn't been terribly astute in his choice of roles: You can't blame him, I suppose, for reprising Indiana Jones, but what about "Firewall," "Hollywood Homicide," "Random Hearts," and "K-19: The Widowmaker," where he played a Russian naval officer with an authenticity as light as his accent was thick?