Harrison Ford heads up Crossing Over‘s cast as Max Brogan, a world-weary veteran agent with the Los Angeles division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  Participating in his umpteenth raid on a local warehouse, he arrests a young woman (Alice Braga) who pleads with him to help reunite her with her son.  He’s too late to stop her from being deported, but he does find the boy and takes him back home to his grandparents in Mexico while he waits for word on the missing mother.  Meanwhile, Max’s Iranian-American partner Hamid Baraheri (Cliff Curtis, who actually hails from New Zealand) is dealing with a schism amongst his family.  His sister Zahara (Melody Khazae) is flouting their traditional ways, wearing cleavage-baring outfits and carrying on an open affair with a married man.  With their father set to be naturalized as an American citizen in a few days, Hamid and his younger brother are being pressured to bring Zahara back into the fold.  When she and her lover unexpectedly turn up dead, Max can’t help but wonder if his partner knows more about the crime than he’s letting on.

These twin plots alone would be enough for one movie, but Kramer continues piling on the competing narratives.  Other subplots revolve around an aspiring actress from Australia (Alice Eve), who pimps herself out to a married customs officer (Ray Liotta) for her green card; a Korean teenager (Justin Chon) that’s being bullied into joining a local gang; a kindly immigration lawyer (Ashley Judd) who contemplates adopting a Nigerian orphan; and a high-school student (Summer Bishil) who is investigated by Homeland Security after she gives a presentation in class expressing sympathy for the 9/11 hijackers.  Perhaps the strangest and least consequential storyline involves a British musician (Jim Sturgess) who pretends to be an observant Jew in order to get his visa application approved.  He’s also been carrying on a flirtation with the Aussie actress, but throws her out of his apartment in disgust when he learns that she’s been dancing the horizontal mambo in order to gain U.S. residency.  Maybe that’s the moral of the story: never trust an Australian girl, because she’s probably just into you for your citizenship.

To be fair, the first half-hour or so of Crossing Over isn’t that bad.  Where Crash and Babel piled on the melodrama from the first frame, Kramer initially keeps the drama grounded in a recognizable reality.  In her brief scenes, Braga delivers a strong performance as a mother sick with worry over the fate of her child, while Curtis exudes a quiet authority that gives Ford’s well-established gravitas a run for its money.  But once the plot mechanics kick into gear, it becomes increasingly difficult to take the movie seriously, particularly when confronted by scenes like the one where Hamid encounters the Korean teen in the midst of a liquor store hold-up and delivers an impassioned soliloquy about what it means to be an American that sets the boy straight.  You almost have to admire Kramer for writing a scene that cheesy without a trace of irony.  Crossing Over believes wholeheartedly in what its saying–it’s just a shame that the film doesn’t express itself in a more convincing way.

Verdict: Skip It

This week, Indiana Jones returns for the fourth–and final?–time; Mena Suvari gets in a bad car accident in Stuck; a new Alfred Hitchcock box set will dazzle movie buffs; and Terrence Malick’s The New World gets an extra thirty minutes.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Paramount
$39.99 Standard/Blu-ray

Even though it grossed over $300 million at the box office (making it the third highest grossing movie of ’08, behind The Dark Knight and Iron Man), it’s gotten hard to find anyone who is actually willing to admit that they liked the fourth Indiana Jones movie.  Hell, the dudes over at South Park just offered up their own scathing critique on a recent episode, depicting franchise masterminds Steven Spielberg and George Lucas raping their leading man over and over again.

Now I ask you: does Kingdom of the Crystal Skull deserve that kind of hatred?  No, of course not.  No movie does…well, except maybe Jumper.  And Life is Beautiful.  And maybe Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla.  But Crystal Skull really isn’t that bad.  Sure, its not Raiders of the Lost Ark, but let’s be completely honest here—neither are Temple of Doom or Last Crusade.  The truth of the matter is that the series grew increasingly fantastical as it went along and Crystal Skull carries the fantasy one step further.  Director Steven Spielberg makes that clear right up front when he has Indy survive a nuclear blast by ducking into a lead-lined refrigerator that’s blown dozens of miles at an insanely high speed.  The archeologist’s adventure only gets more unlikely from there, climaxing in a controversial close encounter with the third kind.  But the cartoonish action and those pesky aliens (excuse me, “interdimensional beings”) weren’t the elements that hurt KOTCS for me; I was more disappointed by the movie’s flabby pacing and lack of emotional stakes for its hero.  Still, I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t a thrill to see Harrison Ford crack that whip one more time.  As I said in my original review back in May, this wasn’t a movie that needed to be made, but it has been made and it doesn’t suck.  And at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters.

Extras: Disc 1 offers two pre-production documentaries, which explore the long road the fourth Indiana Jones movie took toward reaching the big screen.  (Learn that Shia LaBeouf’s character was originally a girl and that one of the early titles was Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men.  Learn also that Spielberg blames Lucas for a lot of the film’s more hotly debated elements, most notably the aliens.  Gee, defensive much Steve?)  The second disc, meanwhile, sports a 90-minute look at the film’s production, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at everything from the opening sequence at Area 51 to the joyous wedding scene that closes the picture.  Additional featurettes examine the post-production process, the visual effects and the tie-in video game Lego Indiana Jones.

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Stuck
Image
$27.98 Standard/$35.98 Blu-ray

Here’s a doozy of a movie idea for ya: Mena Suvari plays a nursing home worker on the verge of getting a big promotion.  Driving home under the influence following a late-night celebration, she hits a homeless guy (Stephen Rea) who goes through her windshield and gets stuck there, with jagged pieces of glass puncturing various body parts.  Rather than drive the poor guy to the nearest hospital, Suvari heads straight home and hides the car in her garage, hoping he’ll just die already.  But he doesn’t and she’s forced to resort to drastic measures to keep her crime from being discovered.

Sounds too good to be true, right?  Well, believe it or not, Stuck is supposedly based on a true story, although the details have obviously been changed to protect the innocent and raise the dramatic stakes.  Director Stuart Gordon is an expert at finding dark comedy in horrific situations (see his 1985 cult classic Re-Animator for proof) and the surprising thing about Stuck is how funny it is, particularly given the suffering that Rea is forced to endure throughout the movie.  It should be said that this is not a film for the squeamish; Gordon lovingly lingers on Rea’s wounds and the picture ends in a brutal orgy of violence.  At the same time, it has more on its mind than just grossing the audience out.  At heart, the movie is really about the way modern society discourages looking out for others in need.  Even before he winds up in Suvari’s windshield, Rea is repeatedly humiliated and treated like dirt by the people around him.  I don’t want to oversell Stuck, because at the end of the day it is a very small movie.  But it also has more to say than a lot of movies with twice the budget.

Extras: The standard version only comes with a trailer, but the Blu-ray release houses a commentary track with the director and stars, as well as three featurettes.

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Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection
MGM
$119.98

There are already at ton of Alfred Hitchcock box sets on the market, including Universal’s The Masterpiece Collection (which sports Psycho, Rear Window and Rope among others), Warner’s The Signature Collection (which houses Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) and Lionsgate’s Alfred Hitchcock Box Set (boasting some of the director’s earliest films, including the silent movies The Ring and Manxman.  But MGM’s new Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection may have them all beat, at least from a packaging standpoint.  This beautifully designed set places its eight discs inside a spiral notebook that features vintage poster art, trivia and production information and select blurbs from period reviews.

The movies themselves cover a fascinating period in Hitchcock’s history, spanning his transition from one of Britain’s up-and-coming young filmmakers to the next big Hollywood A-lister.  Kicking off with 1927′s The Lodger, a clever take on the Jack the Ripper story, the Premiere Collection also offers 1936′s spy thriller Sabotage, 1944′s war movie Lifeboat and 1945′s psychological thriller Spellbound.  The set’s crown jewel though is 1940′s Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first big American success and one of his very best films.  (Trivia alert: it’s also the only Hitchcock flick that won the Academy Awards’ top prize, Best Picture.)  If you’re in the market for a holiday gift for that classic film buff in your life, look no further.

Extras: MGM makes certain that the Premiere Collection lives up to its name with an impressive library of bonus features.  Each film sports an audio commentary from prominent film historians, as well as excerpts from old audio interviews with the Master of Suspense and two of his biggest fans, filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut.  Some of the discs also offer retrospective featurettes and vintage radio plays based on the movie.

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The New World: Extended Cut
Warner Bros
$19.97

Without doing side-by-side comparisons, it’s difficult to pick out what material in this extended cut of Terrence Malick’s gorgeous birth-of-America epic is new and what already appeared in the movie’s theatrical version back in 2005.  That’s because Malick doesn’t stage scenes in the classic sense of the word; instead, the famously reclusive writer/director captures small moments in time and assembles them into a structure that’s part narrative, part visual poetry.  That said, I did notice a few bits and pieces that I couldn’t recall from the other cut, most of which boiled down to a line or two of dialogue or a few more shots of swaying trees and babbling brooks during the film’s many nature montages.

The most noticeable difference between the two versions is that The Extended Cut (which runs almost a half-hour longer than the theatrical cut) breaks the movie up into chapters, with titles like “The Stranger” and “The Return of the Floating Islands.”  I’m not a big fan of this change to be honest, not just because its unnecessary (the movie is perfectly easy to follow without chapter breaks), but also because it goes against the free-flowing spirit of so much of Malick’s work.  Still, in either version, The New World is a spectacular film and my personal favorite of the director’s relatively small output.  His take on the Pocahontas story mingles myth and history in bold, memorable ways and Q’orianka Kilcher’s performance as the Native American princess remains one of the most impressive screen debuts I’ve ever seen.  Rather than replace my theatrical version with this extended cut, I’m happy to make room for both on my shelf.

Extras: Zero, zip, nada—another reason to hang onto the DVD of the theatrical cut, which included a 10-part making of documentary.

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Also on DVD

Lionsgate continues to corner the DVD market on horror with another one of their patented anthology series.  Like “8 Films to Die For” or “6 Films to Keep You Awake”  Ghost House Underground (Lionsgate, $159.98) offers eight low-budget frightfests that can be purchased separately at $20 a pop or in a box set for $160.  Titles include the prom-themed Dance of the Dead, the bank heist chiller Trackman and Last House in the Woods, which resembles a modern-day version of the ’70s grindhouse hit I Spit on Your Grave.  Each disc comes with a handful of extras, which range from commentary tracks to featurettes to additional short films.

A month after The Godfather films made the jump to Blu-ray, another groundbreaking trilogy is given a Blu makeover.  The Ultimate Matrix Collection Blu-ray (Warner Bros, $129.95) offers all of the content previously released in the standard edition Ultimate Matrix Collection box, but upgrades it to the next-gen digital format.  In addition to all three films, the set comes with the animated tie-in The Animatrix and a whopping 35 hours of bonus goodies, from a feature-length documentary exploring the philosophical roots of The Matrix to trailers and early conceptual artwork.  All in all, it’s a treasure trove of great stuff for Matrix fans…and there are still many of us out there, despite the prevailing popular opinion about the woefully underrated sequels Reloaded and Revolutions.

Between Iron Man, Tropic Thunder and the upcoming The Soloist, 2008 may be the best year in Robert Downey Jr.’s entire career.  Still, it’s worth remembering that the actor delivered a number of celebrated performances before donning Iron Man’s armor, most notably in Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic Chaplin: 15th Anniversary Edition (Lionsgate, $19.98).  Downey received his first (and so far only) Oscar nomination for playing the pioneering comedy legend and seemed poised to take his career to a whole new level…until substance abuse problems landed him in rehab and then jail.  Now htat he’s back on top, here’s hoping he doesn’t make the same mistakes the second time around.

Indie label Film Movement—a great source for under the radar independent and foreign flicks—releases the acclaimed Argentinean teen drama XXY (Film Movement, $19.98), about a sexually adventurous 15-year-old girl who sparks a relationship with a visiting older boy, much to the displeasure of her folks.  A galaxy of ’70s superstars headlines Peter Hyams’ sci-fi dramaCapricorn One out today in a Special Edition (Lionsgate, $19.98) to mark its thirtieth anniversary.  In addition to James Brolin, Sam Waterston and Elliot Gould, the film—which finds NASA staging a Mars mission in an empty air force base so that they don’t have to admit their rocket couldn’t clear Earth’s atmosphere—also stars Telly “Kojak” Savalas and a pre-bloody glove O.J. Simpson.  Staying in the realm of ’70s sci-fi for a moment, Quark: The Complete Series (Sony, $19.94) collects all eight episodes of this short-lived space-based sitcom, which spoofed popular movies like Star Wars and Star Trek.  Finally, the second season of CBS’s popular comedy Rules of Engagement (Sony, $29.95), starring David Spade and Patrick Warburton, hits shelves and includes bloopers and minisodes among its bonus feature.

Indiana Jones returns to the big screen for a fourth time in the good but not great Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

“This probably feels familiar to you,” icy Russian agent Irina Spalko tells her prisoner, respected professor/daring adventurer Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr., at the beginning of the long-awaited Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by George Lucas. She’s right: it does. Once again, our fedora-wearing, whip-cracking hero is in a tight spot, outmanned and outgunned with his own life—not to mention America’s safety—hanging in the balance. But even though the circumstances are familiar, Dr. Jones himself is not…at least, not right away. It’s been nineteen years since we saw Indiana ride off into the sunset at the end of The Last Crusade and time has definitely left its mark on him. His hair is grayer, his waist thicker and his movements are slower and more deliberate than the man we saw scrambling away a giant stone ball over two decades ago. You can’t help but feel a little guilty critiquing Indy’s (and, by extension, Harrison Ford’s) sixty-something physique—after all, it’s not like he asked to age—but let’s face it: the biggest obstacle facing the new Indiana Jones film is the actor’s age. Would he still be believable raiding tombs and fighting Nazis (or, in this case, Soviets) or should this film have been titled Indiana Jones and the Search for the Florida Retirement Community?

The good news is that once you get over the shock of seeing Indiana looking so world-weary and…well, old, Ford busts out his defiant sneer and completely becomes the character you remember from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade. Indiana’s body may have aged, but his quick mind and uncanny ability to improvise an escape in the face of impossible odds are as reliable as ever. Needless to say, it isn’t long before he escapes Irina’s clutches and takes out a sizeable number of her henchmen in the process. Unfortunately, he isn’t able to stop her from making off with her prize: a mysterious box that contains the body of what could be some kind of extraterrestrial being. (And that obvious reference to E.T. is one of many homages to Spielberg and Lucas’ past work—look closely and you’ll also spot shout-outs to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, American Graffiti, A New Hope and Poltergeist.) Because of his presence at the scene of the crime—which occurred at an American military base referred to as Hanger 51—Indy becomes a person of interest to the Soviet-hating FBI. Despite his decorated service record from World War II, Indy is marked as a suspected Commie and subsequently finds himself out of a job and, possibly, out of a home. The idea of Indiana Jones as a man whose time has passed is a potent one and one that Spielberg and Lucas mine for much of the first half of movie. One of the film’s most striking, if improbable, shots shows Indy standing beneath an enormous nuclear-generated mushroom cloud—a dwarf in the shadow of the atomic age.

But then a young motorcycle-riding greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) enters the story and Crystal Skull turns into another globetrotting adventure that takes Indiana to creepy underground caverns filled with deadly booby traps and lush jungles populated by restless natives and dangerous animals in pursuit of a priceless artifact. This particular relic is the titular crystal cranium, an actual bit of archeological phenomena that dates back to Aztec times. The Russians want it because Irina believes it holds the key to an entirely new kind of warfare—one where her armies will be able to conquer the minds of their enemies before opening fire. Indy initially wants it so that the Russians won’t get it, but then a mental “conversation” with the skull entrusts him with a new mission—return it to the fabled Lost City of Gold from whence it came. Aiding him in that mission are an old colleague, Professor Oxley (John Hurt) and his former flame (and Mutt’s mother) Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). And if you haven’t already figured out from all the blatant clues that Mutt is Indy’s son than you’re as clueless as he is.

Before watching Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I made a point of going back to see Raiders, Indy’s first and best adventure. Even on the small screen, what stands out about that film is its relentless pace. There are few lulls and every action sequence is not only a blast to watch, but also pushes the narrative forward. That’s an increasing rarity in modern blockbuster spectacles, where the big set-pieces usually interrupt the flow of the movie instead of feeding into it. The later Indiana Jones adventure are somewhat guilty of this as well, but Crystal Skull is the first one where a significant number of the fight and flight scenes don’t really feel necessary. That’s not to say that they aren’t a lot of fun—on the contrary, they’re more imaginatively staged than anything in Iron Man. As an example of what I’m trying to get at, let’s look at an early scene where Mutt and Indy speed through the streets of New Haven with two Soviet gunmen on their heels. On its own terms this scene is a blast to watch; Ford and LaBeouf play off each other quite well and Spielberg adds some inventive roadblocks to the traditional chase sequence structure. But there’s no compelling narrative reason for this chase to take place—in fact, it essentially stops the story in its tracks.

Then again, given how uneven the story is, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Although David Koepp is credited with writing the screenplay, the script passed through a number of hands on its way to the big screen and the finished product often feels like a patchwork of several different drafts. The first half of the film in particular lumbers around as it strains to establish the Mutt/Indy relationship, introduce the concept of the crystal skulls and then sends the adventurers off into the middle of the Amazon. Once the gang is on the run in the jungle though, the pacing improves considerably. The film’s centerpiece is a wild rainforest car chase that involves front-hood sword fights, vine-swinging monkeys and carnivorous red ants. All this climaxes with our heroes plunging down not just one, but three giant waterfalls on their way to the fabled golden city. I expect there to be a lot of disagreement about the last half-hour of the movie, which spins the Indy saga off into overtly science-fiction territory. Personally, I wasn’t bothered by this change in direction—I just wish it didn’t feel so rushed and clunky. It’s a bad sign when the audience walks out of the theater not entirely certain what just happened.

And now we arrive at the million-dollar question: is Crystal Skull worth the nineteen-year wait? The answer is a resounding yes…and no. Once my initial skepticism wore off, I completely enjoyed my long-awaited (and long-dreaded) reunion with Indy. After a long string of sub-par performances in terrible movies, Ford finally seems to be enjoying himself again. The same goes for Spielberg, who seizes the opportunity to lighten up after the dour one-two punch of War of the Worlds and Munich. Even when the screenplay stumbles, the movie plunges ahead with a confidence and swagger that can only come from a director and star that are truly working in sync. The supporting cast, from Blanchett to Allen, gets into the spirit of the enterprise as well. And I can’t imagine any Raiders fan not feeling satisfied by the film’s final scene, which sends Indy and Marion off on an entirely new adventure (let’s just say that an exchange of rings is involved).

All that said, I would have felt just as satisfied if Crystal Skull had never been made and our last glimpse of Indiana Jones would have forever remained that sun-dappled closing shot from The Last Crusade. Even though I’d rank the film as the third best in the series—behind Raiders and Crusade but ahead of Temple—there are some significant problems here that will probably grow more pronounced on further viewings, when the nostalgic thrill has worn off. I’m also concerned that Lucas and Spielberg have revived Indy just so they can launch a whole new franchise on the back of young Mr. LaBeouf—they even hint as much with a concluding gag that finds Mutt picking up Indy’s weather-beaten fedora. Much as I liked LaBeouf’s performance, I don’t think Mutt has the right mix of gravitas and gumption to carry the series on his own. Besides, we go to an Indiana Jones movie to see Indiana Jones, not his rebellious offspring. In some ways, his character is one of the weak spots of Crystal Skull; the filmmakers are clearly trying to replicate the Sean Connery/Harrison Ford dynamic from Last Crusade, but the central joke of that movie was that Indy is always reduced to the status of a child whenever his dad is around. It’s less funny when he takes on the role of the father figure…as we already know from Temple of Doom.

So to sum up: despite its many flaws, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an enjoyable romp that does no harm to the character’s legacy. It may not be a film that needed to be made, but it has been made and it doesn’t suck. And at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters.