Cut from the same cloth as films such as Crash and Syriana, Crossing Over is set in present day Los Angeles and interweaves numerous stories about characters from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, bonded by their struggle to secure their immigration status in the USA.

Harrison Ford plays Max Brogan, a senior officer with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement squad and the lives of many other characters gravitate around him and his bleeding heart liberal sensibilities. The story strands are desperately clichéd and hackneyed and even those that start off interestingly enough, like Ray Liotta’s deviant judicial officer, Cliff Curtis as Ford’s troubled Iranian partner, or the teenage Muslim girl who openly defends the 9-11 hijackers in front of her English class, quickly run out of steam, leaving us with little more than closed-minded Middle-Eastern parents, tearaway Asian kids and Mexican fence jumpers with which to explore the ethics of immigration and identity.

It’s sad to see how far Harrison Ford’s star has fallen. Not since The Fugitive has he put in anything approaching a decent performance in anything close to a good movie. And I was one of the few people who didn’t want to slash the seats at the end of Legend of the Crystal Skull. These days Ford comes across as just so damned tired, drained of any of the charm and wit he seemed to effortlessly exude back in his glory days as Han Solo and in the earlier Indiana Jones adventures. What he presents us with now is a mumbling, squinting shell of a man who sleepwalks through movies with a slightly confused look on his face, like a drunken vagrant trying to work out which alley he fell asleep in and where he left his bag of tin cans.

The film most resembles Paul Haggis’ 2007 Oscar winner Crash and the director, Wayne Kramer, is very obviously trying to emulate that film and its powerful, if unsubtle, melodrama. It fails, however, mostly due to Kramer simply not being the accomplished storyteller that Haggis clearly is. In Crossing Over the different stories progress in a seemingly random order, struggling to maintain coherence or any overriding sense of pace or structure. The film can’t decide which of its stories or characters it likes and which are important, wrapping up the best ones way too early and stringing out the others well beyond their expiration date. Crossing Over has more endings than Return of the King, and dedicates at least half an hour to the catharsis of characters we couldn’t give a damn about, wrapping up its different plot threads in a totally haphazard and dramatically negligent manner. The result is a jumble of two-dimensional characters entangled in half a dozen uninspiring tales, making the whole watching experience rather less interesting than spending an afternoon at Immigration. James Marsh