Harrison Ford, as L.A. cop Max Brogan, arrests illegal alien Mireya (Alice Braga) in Wayne Kramer's immigration drama Crossing Over. (The Weinstein Company)

Crossing Over is a congested, cacophonous take on the big issue of immigration in the U.S. today. It contains close to a bazillion (I counted) short stories about newcomers in the City of Angels, each linked to the next by coincidence or endless shots of the teeming, looping L.A. freeway.

This film has a sincerity that Crash lacked, but little of the intelligence of Babel. Crossing Over’s heart is in the right place, but its head is somewhere unmentionable.

This puzzle-structure marks Crossing Over as an imitator of Crash and Babel, two other brimming pleas for humanity in the face of anonymity. Crossing Over has a sincerity that Crash – perhaps one of the most manipulative, overrated films of the past decade – lacked but little of the intelligence of Babel. This film’s heart is in the right place, but its head is somewhere unmentionable.

Harrison Ford plays Max, a good-guy immigration cop caught in the quagmire of dubious ethics that defines the Department of Homeland Security. Despite the soul-sucking nature of the work – he mostly leads sweatshop busts, escorting illegal Mexicans to buses traveling southward – Max has retained some compassion. Calling in sick, he lends a hand to a young deported mother (Alice Braga) who has become separated from her son. Max’s partner, Hamid (played by Maori actor Cliff Curtis), is a naturalized citizen from Iran. Hamid’s well-to-do family, the stereotypical immigrant success story, is crippled by pride, essentially shunning Habib’s U.S.-born sister for indulging in a little low-grade, American-as-apple-pie sluttiness. This leads to one of Ford’s worst lines — in a script that’s heavy with lead — as he chastises Hamid for intolerance: “In this country, we don’t abide by that s---.” Is it possible that the mere presence of Harrison Ford requires an ass-kicking moment, even when he’s playing a rather gentle fellow?

Writer-director Wayne Kramer is sympathetic to the plight of his characters, but their saintliness too often undermines his message of acceptance — they don’t feel like real people but rather signifiers of America’s failings. Ashley Judd plays an immigration lawyer trying to save the world’s cutest kid, a Nigerian refugee (Ogechi Egonu). Meanwhile, her husband (Ray Liotta) is a sleazeball immigration agent who demands sex in exchange for the issuing of a green card to a comely Australian actress (Alice Eve). The improbability of their meeting borders on farce: they have a fender bender, talk turns to her immigration status and five seconds later, it’s a hotel-room dalliance and a deal with the devil.

Alice Eve and Jim Sturgess play immigrants trying to get a foothold in the U.S. in Crossing Over. (The Weinstein Company)

In fact, the whole film suffers from this kind of distracting implausibility: a character learns a key plot point on an answering machine, even though he enters the room checking his cell; an immigration agent outs an illegal actress by checking the Internet Movie Database; and an unsolved murder is completely devoid of whodunit tension. (Yeah, it’s that guy. You’ll know him the first time you see him.)

The most compelling plot line concerns a Muslim teenager named Taslima (Summer Bashil), who makes an incendiary speech in her high school classroom in which she expresses understanding of the 9/11 hijackers. Soon after, Homeland Security agents descend on the girl’s bedroom, threatening her family with expulsion. Whether this teen in the hijab is really a fundamentalist en route to becoming a suicide bomber is never fully clear, but watching her family fall into the well of deportation without due process is grueling — it’s the film’s emotional centrepiece. If Taslima wasn’t anti-American before, she is now.

Kramer also packs in some Korean gang violence and a British, atheist singer-songwriter (Jim Sturgess) who plays up his Jewishness to get status as a religious scholar. There, finally, in Sturgess’s light performance, is a little welcome humour to ease the relentless tragedy. This filmmaking trend, where technically complicated bombast tries to pass as import, has probably run its course. How about telling a single story well rather than a dozen stories poorly? Films that matter should be moving without being punishing.

Crossing Over opens March 13.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.