In Beyond Borders,
Angelina Jolie -- she of the bruised lips and limpid eyes -- plays
Sarah, who, in her white strapless gown and pearls, has no sooner
finished pogoing to "Should I Stay or Should I Go" on the
dance floor of a London formal-dress charity benefit in 1984 than
she is knocked to one side by Nick (Clive Owen), who angrily
denounces everyone in the room for eating fancy foods and drinking
fancy wine while he's scrambling to find food and medicine to help
the starving Ethiopian child whom he's (exploitatively) brought
along with him. Sarah is so moved that she takes a convoy of food to
the refugee camp in (then) war-torn Ethiopia, where, along the way,
she rescues a child being stalked by a vulture (just like in the
Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph) -- the child expresses its
gratitude by glaring at her in what looks like decidedly CGI-created
eyes. Nick also expresses his gratitude by ridiculing Sarah for
wearing perfume for a trip into the desert -- he'll later confer his
approval by noting that she did not wear perfume when she treks into
Cambodia to see him.
Owen's Nick is definitely the more interesting of the two: he asks for help from the international community by issuing such subtle statements that go something like, "They should get off their f**king asses and get the f**k down here!... It's the same s**t every time!" He also isn't above smuggling guns under prosthetic legs and medicine packages -- when a Cambodian officer (Burt Kwouk) finds them, he starts switching Nick with what looks like a car radio antennae, until Jolie's Sarah steps in and really puts the kicks in! (All that training for the Lara Croft movies.) Later, after the scene with the baby and the live hand grenade, she and Nick will lead a long line of refugees, through the jungle, through the rain, to a Red Cross camp on the Vietnamese border, after which they will make passionate (but discretely-presented) love, then make cute post-coital banter. (He: "Shall I ring down for room service?" She: "Chocolate cake, and air conditioning. That would be lovely." They're in a tent, mind you.)
In part, this is a movie about
Angelina Jolie's hair. Engaged in a serious conversation with her
sister (Teri Polo, who's good), one can only notice how her hair
falls in little bangs over her forehead. In the Cambodian jungle,
the rain only makes it look darker, fuller, and more flowing. This
is probably because her hair stylings are the most dramatic thing
about her in this movie. The girl has serious emotive problems --
she seems to have retreated as an actress over the years -- and her
line deliveries, even in SDDS sound, can become as low and muzzily
inaudible as in Tomb Raider (and she isn't even using an
accent, here). I am aware that, in real life, she is engaged in
actual humanitarian work in some of the places that also turn up in
the movie, but one gets the impression that the film expects is to
give it extra points just for dealing with the subject of relief aid
to begin with, and that Jolie wants us to read a lot more into her
earnstwhile presence, here, than is actually there. She is not
terribly expressive; when she tries to be really expressive, she
gets goggle-eyed.
The film uses its first episode, in Ethiopia, to point up famine relief, the second the problem with land mines. (The bodies and ruined limbs are presented decorously in both.) The third, though, is devoted to rescuing not famine victims or victims of political terror but to rescuing Nick, disappeared somewhere into war-torn Chechnya, the current troublespot-du-jour.
Amid landscapes and backdrops of black, grays, and ghostly whites, Sarah, in a fetching (hopefully fake) fur hat and dark coat, runs across the snow with bullet-pocked Nick, and they look like something out of a second-rate version of Doctor Zhivago, where Yuri and Lara were trying to outrun the Bolsheviks. When one of the characters steps on a landmine and goes poof! you have a most unpleasant reaction.
Review by Linus Roache · Nitrate Online
