Harrison Ford has long shown a kind of avoidance mentality (some would say a chickenshit attitude) when it came to starring in realistic docu-dramas. He famously declined to star in Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic (a movie about drugs), and then bowed out of a starring role in Stephen Gaghan‘s Syriana, which was about the geopolitics of big oil. (“I didn’t feel strongly enough about the truth of the material ,and I think I made a mistake,” Ford allegedly said). He also sidestepped a shot at starring in A History of Violence.

Now, weeks before he starts work on the fourth Indiana Jones film, Ford has had a change of heart. Starting on Wednesday he’ll be playing some kind of lead role in a Mexican immigration film for the Weinstein Co. called Crossing Over. Costarring Sean Penn and Ray Liotta, it reportedly “focuses on the gut-wrenching drama of people caught up in the nation’s immigration morass,” blah, blah.

The consensus seems to be that it’s going to be Crash-like. This would normally be a concern, but the fact that Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, The Cooler) has written the script and is also directing is reason for hope. The film is tentatively set for a fall ’07 release. What is that, three or four months in post?