Beyond Borders Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 24th, 2003
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Beyond Borders is being sold as an epic romance set in exotic yet dangerous locales like 1984 Ethiopia, 1989 Cambodia and 1995 Chechnya. And it's epic, all right. Epically boring. If it weren't for Angelina Jolie's puffy lips and the always real possibility she'll show some skin, I would have walked out of my screening, gone to a laundromat and watched towels spin around in a dryer, because that would have been more compelling. Borders is too slow and humdrum for action fans, and too disturbing (especially with those icky starving children everywhere) for romance fans.
Jolie (The Cradle of Life) plays American Sarah Jordan, the soon-to-be wife of a dull but well-to-do Brit named Henry Bauford (Linus Roache, Hart's War). It's at one of the Bauford family's fundraising parties for worldwide aid relief that Sarah meets Nick Callahan (Clive Owen, The Bourne Identity), a doctor without borders whose funding for his current mission in Ethiopia has just been cut. Nick is quite the showman, dragging a starving Ethiopian boy along with him to make a point about how silly it is to celebrate the slightest bit of philanthropy with cases of expensive champagne while kids are still starving.
Nick uses the boy to exploit the situation, and I wish I could say that's the end of Borders' exploitative nature. Instead it's the first 10 minutes of a two-plus-hour journey that involves Jolie's Sarah doing more traveling than her Lara Croft and scooping up the most sickly baby she can find and affixing it to her hip within seconds of her arrival in whatever godforsaken location she happens to find herself. Sarah loves going to the various perilous places wearing stuff normally confined to fashion show runways, whether it's the Kentucky Derby ensemble she sports in Ethiopia or the hysterical fur hat worn in Chechnya.
Some of the bullshit might be excusable if there were sufficient heat in her inevitable sexual relationship with Nick, but their chemistry is nearly as weak as the Hopkins-Kidman debacle in The Human Stain. Hack director Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Vertical Limit) apparently has never heard of pacing, as the jerky picture shuffles us through three different periods of time while it apes enough other films to make you laugh out loud. Look! It's Harrison's Flowers! Oooh, now it's Tears of the Sun! Wait a second - Tears of the Sun sucked. Why would I want to see it again?
2:07 - R for language and war-related violence
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