Critic Reviews

Watching Douglas behave like a narcissistic scumbag is an absolute pleasure, one in which viewers of action-adventure Beyond the Reach can happily indulge.

The cat-and-mouse chase across the desert that follows is entertaining to begin with but unnecessarily drawn out, leaving far too much room for Douglas to plug with cartoonish quips and daft machismo.

For a movie that rides on a well-executed, modest and at times playful B-movie engine, the film stumbles in its final third, with goofy plotting... and a turn from the subdued to the hysterical.

The folks re-adapting White’s book for Beyond the Reach tamper and tinker with perfection — a little overly convenient cheating here, a contrived finale that goes wrong and then goes more wrong. The film staggers under these blows and never really recovers.

The formulaic cat-and-mouse game played to the death rattle by Michael Douglas’ rich, vicious corporate maniac and Jeremy Irvine’s nice, clean-cut, homespun country boy in Beyond the Reach is so old it’s hairy.

Any wilderness ordeal has to help some character clarify something, and for Ben it’s his relationship with his girlfriend (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), which gives the film a modest side interest. But mostly this one is for fans of desert scenery and of Mr. Douglas in cranky, crazy mode.

The flat-out awful ending, though, deflates much of the goodwill built up by the rest of the film.

But there's not much here: The characters are paper-thin, and the action is slow, at times agonizingly so.

Madec and Ben's showdown becomes a battle to see which type of man is best equipped for survival: the well-funded scoundrel or the honest grunt. The film is too honest itself to always give us the answer we want. It's also too dully on-the-nose to entertain.

Beyond the Reach is a misfire, one of those movies that never quite rises to the level of guilty pleasure.