***No major spoilers here - nobody likes their movie ruined, just a fairly critical review.***
I just watched it, and I loved this movie, but not for the reasons anyone else listed.
Professional sarcast Lore Sjöberg's Law of Cinematic Inaccuracy goes: "Movies get everything wrong. Hacking-based movies are laughable to hackers, military-based movies are laughable to members of the armed forces, and Indiana Jones movies are laughable to archaeologists." I believe the original version also included cop shows are laughable to cops.
I found Across The Line so unrealistic that it was downright hilarious. I found myself laughing through almost every scene.
As someone who's lived and worked on the border - including many of the towns portrayed and mentioned in the film, this movie is comedy gold.
The portrayal of the Border Patrol is so over-the-top that even members of The Race (not the Harry Turtledove space lizards, the racists at "The Race" aka La Raza) wouldn't buy it. But it's SO unbelievably over-the-top that it's hilarious unintentional parody of what a certain political mindset thinks.
"The coyote" is singularly hilarious on his own, and Eagle Pass, TX as an _actual pass_, as opposed to a city of about 50,000 people (which is really just the nicest neighborhood in Piedras Negras, Mexico with a population of 170,000 or so) is comical.
The "touching story" tells a wonderfully fictional narrative of a college-educated woman who runs from political oppression in Central America and seeks to get into the US to get away from it. In real life, all she'd have to do is go to a regular Port of Entry and declare asylum. There's a lot of paperwork and hassle, but no need to hike through the desert, let alone go through Mexico, where she can be detained and arrested even by Mexican citizens as an illegal alien. She can actually fly to an international airport in the US and just declare asylum there.
One thing that was done right, though hamfistedly, was that coyotes exploit OTMs. They know they can always turn them over to Mexican authorities - who actually are as bad as Ms. Erez wrote the USBP to be. The sad thing is that for less than the coyote's price, they can usually get visas or resident papers if they didn't choose to break the law.
From a technical standpoint, the movie is visually fun to watch. The lighting work is excellent, and both indoor and outdoor scenes were filmed pretty darn well. Editing was solid, and a few scenes that weren't related to Ms. Erez's overt and hilariously wrong political narrative were actually humanizing.
Brad Johnson is excellent in his part, quite believable, even if he's a bit wooden at times, and many of the lines he (and every other character) delivers are forced, or the kind of cheesy, ridiculous political commentary thrown into characters' mouths that's just laughable by itself. When he's given good lines and scenes - even unintentionally humorous clichéd ones, he does quite well, as does Marshall Teague.
Sigal Erez's character is... well, she wrote it, and she used the character to tell the story she wanted to tell (however disparate from reality it is). Her perception of the border is every bit as fictional as her film, sad to say. She CAN act - if given something that was more than a just an unabashedly political piece, I think she'd do very well. She'd do quite well if she did a political piece that was a bit more subtle than a carpet bombing raid. Ms. Erez herself is very pleasant to watch on screen, and her film is genuinely made with good intent. She'd do well to do significantly more research and write a realistic story. With the same effort she put into Across The Line, she could've made a genuinely good film.
The supporting cast does a pretty good job as well doing what Ms. Erez wanted them to do, even though they're also caricatures and stereotypes. The characters being so vividly, overtly, intentionally out to tell Ms. Erez' unreal message makes them laughable, even if they're portrayed technically well by actors.
Adrienne Barbeau being in the movie reminded me of when Alice Cooper showed up in John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" as "street schizo". It makes no sense, you just realize "hey, that's Adrienne Barbeau!", and you just run with it.
To sum up, it was so woefully inaccurate and consistently absurd that it made me laugh the whole way through, the scenes were well-lit and technically done well, the casting was good, and the apolitical scenes are sometimes quite good. Too bad the story wasn't one grounded in reality - it would've made a great film all-around - instead, the story turns it into 24 karat comedy gold to anyone who actually knows the border.
I just watched it, and I loved this movie, but not for the reasons anyone else listed.
Professional sarcast Lore Sjöberg's Law of Cinematic Inaccuracy goes: "Movies get everything wrong. Hacking-based movies are laughable to hackers, military-based movies are laughable to members of the armed forces, and Indiana Jones movies are laughable to archaeologists." I believe the original version also included cop shows are laughable to cops.
I found Across The Line so unrealistic that it was downright hilarious. I found myself laughing through almost every scene.
As someone who's lived and worked on the border - including many of the towns portrayed and mentioned in the film, this movie is comedy gold.
The portrayal of the Border Patrol is so over-the-top that even members of The Race (not the Harry Turtledove space lizards, the racists at "The Race" aka La Raza) wouldn't buy it. But it's SO unbelievably over-the-top that it's hilarious unintentional parody of what a certain political mindset thinks.
"The coyote" is singularly hilarious on his own, and Eagle Pass, TX as an _actual pass_, as opposed to a city of about 50,000 people (which is really just the nicest neighborhood in Piedras Negras, Mexico with a population of 170,000 or so) is comical.
The "touching story" tells a wonderfully fictional narrative of a college-educated woman who runs from political oppression in Central America and seeks to get into the US to get away from it. In real life, all she'd have to do is go to a regular Port of Entry and declare asylum. There's a lot of paperwork and hassle, but no need to hike through the desert, let alone go through Mexico, where she can be detained and arrested even by Mexican citizens as an illegal alien. She can actually fly to an international airport in the US and just declare asylum there.
One thing that was done right, though hamfistedly, was that coyotes exploit OTMs. They know they can always turn them over to Mexican authorities - who actually are as bad as Ms. Erez wrote the USBP to be. The sad thing is that for less than the coyote's price, they can usually get visas or resident papers if they didn't choose to break the law.
From a technical standpoint, the movie is visually fun to watch. The lighting work is excellent, and both indoor and outdoor scenes were filmed pretty darn well. Editing was solid, and a few scenes that weren't related to Ms. Erez's overt and hilariously wrong political narrative were actually humanizing.
Brad Johnson is excellent in his part, quite believable, even if he's a bit wooden at times, and many of the lines he (and every other character) delivers are forced, or the kind of cheesy, ridiculous political commentary thrown into characters' mouths that's just laughable by itself. When he's given good lines and scenes - even unintentionally humorous clichéd ones, he does quite well, as does Marshall Teague.
Sigal Erez's character is... well, she wrote it, and she used the character to tell the story she wanted to tell (however disparate from reality it is). Her perception of the border is every bit as fictional as her film, sad to say. She CAN act - if given something that was more than a just an unabashedly political piece, I think she'd do very well. She'd do quite well if she did a political piece that was a bit more subtle than a carpet bombing raid. Ms. Erez herself is very pleasant to watch on screen, and her film is genuinely made with good intent. She'd do well to do significantly more research and write a realistic story. With the same effort she put into Across The Line, she could've made a genuinely good film.
The supporting cast does a pretty good job as well doing what Ms. Erez wanted them to do, even though they're also caricatures and stereotypes. The characters being so vividly, overtly, intentionally out to tell Ms. Erez' unreal message makes them laughable, even if they're portrayed technically well by actors.
Adrienne Barbeau being in the movie reminded me of when Alice Cooper showed up in John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" as "street schizo". It makes no sense, you just realize "hey, that's Adrienne Barbeau!", and you just run with it.
To sum up, it was so woefully inaccurate and consistently absurd that it made me laugh the whole way through, the scenes were well-lit and technically done well, the casting was good, and the apolitical scenes are sometimes quite good. Too bad the story wasn't one grounded in reality - it would've made a great film all-around - instead, the story turns it into 24 karat comedy gold to anyone who actually knows the border.