Beyond the Reach

We’ve seen Michael Douglas have fun with ruthlessly evil characters before, but Beyond the Reach gives him a role that’s more morally bankrupt than ever.

His unhinged performance brings a sense of reckless abandon to a cat-and-mouse thriller that nevertheless is most often unpleasant, and not in a way that’s provocative or surprising.

Douglas plays Madec, a rich executive with ulterior motives when he hires Ben (Jeremy Irvine), a young guide to lead his hunting trip in one of the most rural areas of the Mojave Desert.

That’s where things get dicey when Madec shoots and kills a drifter he claims to have mistaken for a bighorn sheep. Fearing that Ben won’t keep quiet once they return to civilization, Madec instead turns his young protégé into his prey, giving him a head start among the arid dunes for Madec’s own amusement.

Of course, the plot boils down to one long chase sequence, and considering there are only two characters for most of the running time, they’re not given much depth by screenwriter Stephen Susco (The Grudge), who adapted the script from the novel Deathwatch by Robb White. That book also inspired a television movie in the 1970s with Andy Griffith in the lead role.

At any rate, Ben is impossibly naive and scrupulous, while Madec is exactly the opposite with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. At times, their adversarial interplay is genuinely suspenseful, but mostly is feels contrived. Here’s wishing the hero and villain weren’t quite so clear-cut.

French director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti, making his English-language debut, captures the appropriately rugged and barren terrain with some visual flair.

Beyond the Reach is both a cynical look at capitalism and a half-hearted indictment of how money and power fuel greed and feelings of invincibility. Yet that subtext isn’t given much weight since the film gets more ridiculous as it goes along — one scene features dynamite, treasure maps and other relics from an abandoned mine shaft that feel like leftovers from an Indiana Jones set — and might have played better as a short.

By the end, moviegoers might find their loyalties tested by a misguided western that stretches its most dangerous game to such silly extremes.

Rated R, 91 minutes.