The last thing Angelina Jolie needed to revive her fatigued career was
another snoozer.
Labor of love that it may have been, Jolie’s “Beyond Borders”
generally is beyond boredom, intended as a sweeping love affair between
humanitarian-aid workers but in reality a preachy melodrama that devolves
from monotony to absurdity.
Like Jolie’s action hero Lara Croft, her globe-trotting character
here tramps through deserts and jungles with nary a mussed hair, maintaining
her movie-star luminousness through all hardships.
Co-star Clive Owen is cast as a hard-nosed, anything-for-the-cause crusader,
whose merciless cynicism quickly melts to puppy love with a few battings
of Jolie’s eyes.
And like Richard Attenborough’s “Cry Freedom,” in which
the story of South African activist Steve Biko takes a back seat to the
getaway of his white pal, “Beyond Borders” diminishes the plight
of refugees in favor of a pair of self-absorbed do-gooders with the hots
for each other.
Director Martin Campbell, who took over after Oliver Stone opted out
of the movie, aims for a doomed romance of “Dr. Zhivago” scope
but delivers little more than a soap opera with exotically bleak locations.
“Beyond Borders” unfolds in three chapters, beginning in London
in 1984 as Nick Callahan (Owen) crashes a world-hunger fund-raising ball
that newlywed American Sarah Jordan (Jolie) and her British hubby are
attending.
Nick, a doctor at an Ethiopian camp tending 30,000 starving residents,
makes a fierce condemnation of charity politics that have cut off his
supplies. With implausible schoolgirl pep, Sarah is moved to cash out
her bank account, buy truckloads of food and medicine and head off to
Nick’s camp.
There, she gets tough lessons in the compromises of altruism, while Nick
treats Sarah contemptuously as an interloper playing weekend Mother Teresa.
Yet Sarah’s naive bullheadedness softens Nick’s hard heart,
and you just know the next time these two
meet, they’ll tumble into bed.
Cut to Cambodia, 1989, where Nick and Sarah tumble into bed after a jungle
trek leading locals to safety from the Khmer Rouge. Six years later, Nick
is taken hostage in Chechnya, and Sarah is off again, on a mission to
rescue her man.
The movie deteriorates from tedious but credible glimpses of aid workers
in Ethiopia, to a dreary fling in Cambodia, and finally to a grotesquely
hollow conclusion amid Sarah and Nick’s outlandish escapades in Chechnya.
Through it all, the victims and aid workers to whom the movie is dedicated
gradually become marginalized, until all that’s left on screen is
the egocentric romance of two little people whose problems don’t
amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
