Beyond the Reach *** (2014, Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine, Ronny Cox, Martin Palmer) – Movie Review

Old Michael Douglas and young Jeremy Irvine fight it out in a battle to the death as high-rolling corporate shark Madec and his poor young guide Ben on a hunting trip in the Mojave Desert.

Ronny Cox plays the Sheriff, Hanna Mangan Lawrence is Ben’s girlfriend who has gone and left him, and Martin Palmer is desert-dwelling old-timer Charlie. There are basically only the two roles in the film, four if you count the Sheriff and the girlfriend. This proves its downfall. There aren’t enough characters and new situations fully to sustain a feature length movie.

So after a good set-up and first half, you just keep getting more of exactly the same, which starts getting dull. OK, I get it, old Michael Douglas wants to kill young Jeremy Irvine. But that’s it!

After a lot more of the same, the film eventually wraps up with a perfect ending, and then they’ve got to spoil it by providing something more, which would only work if it were spectacular, but it turns out to be lame.

Nevertheless, the Douglas – Irvine battling duo is a sight worth seeing, and a fight worth paying for. Two actors you’d never put together in a million years work well together, with the very English actor Irvine even managing to seem and sound American. Douglas gives his mean old so-and-so act one more thorough going through, and it’s still pretty mesmerising even in these lesser circumstances.

With the first half establishing its credentials as a good, satisfying thriller, it’s a fair proposition for fans of the genre (that’s nearly everybody!). With more writing and extra plotting, plus maybe a bit more credibility (but even that isn’t essential), this could have been really good.

It feels like an original screenplay but screenwriter Stephen Susco bases his flesh-challenged script on the 1972 novel Death Watch by Robb White. In fact the film is a remake of Savages, a 1974 ABC TV Movie of the Week, with Sam Bottoms and Andy Griffith. Director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti films more than just slickly, he films stylishly, and that helps a lot, along with the great desert locations. It was filmed in Farmington NM and the surrounding area Shiprock on the Navajo Reservation.