Michael Douglas is back to his villainous best in desert-set thriller Beyond the Reach

Beyond the Reach

Director: Jean-Baptiste Léonetti

Starring: Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine, Hanna Mangan Lawrence

Running time: 91 mins

Michael Douglas plays “rich white arsehole” better than any other actor in Hollywood. Not even Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin can hold a candle (or should that be candelabra?) to him. Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in Wall Street was so perfectly reprehensible he became one of the most iconic villains in movie history, while his Liberace offered a genuinely disturbing window into wealth-induced paranoia and madness. 

This time the 70-year-old is Madec, a high-rolling corporate shark who, between cutting billion-dollar deals, likes to indulge in a spot of trophy hunting. Venal, arrogant and sociopathic, he’s a member of the one per cent who wouldn’t just stalk and kill Cecil the Lion, but would probably find a way of charging the poor beast for the privilege of being shot and decapitated, too.

Despite not having the proper permits, Madec bribes his way past the local sheriff of a remote town in America’s south-west, and sets off to hunt game in the Mojave Desert accompanied only by an impoverished young tracker named Ben (Jeremy Irvine). But when Madec accidentally kills an elderly prospector (Martin Palmer), it sets off a game of cat and mouse in which he tries to murder Ben to cover his tracks. It turns out the businessman has been working on a massive deal with the Chinese and being implicated in someone’s death would surely torpedo the whole thing.

On the surface, Madec is an extremely one-dimensional villain but Douglas – that wicked little twinkle ever present in his eye – makes him so much more interesting than that. He lends the character gravitas, gives him a steely presence he simply wouldn’t have if played by a lesser actor. Half-baked bad guys are 10 a penny (see my recent review of Ant-Man) and it takes a truly accomplished performer to breathe life into them.

Against such a powerhouse, British actor Irvine (War Horse, The Railway Man) was always going to come off second best but does well with a fairly limited role in which he’s asked to do little more than take off his shirt, run about a bit and pine for his girlfriend Laina (Hanna Mangan Lawrence). He imbues Ben with an uncomplicated, underdog decency that immediately gets you on his side. Without becoming too political – although the subtext is pretty apparent throughout – he’s the living embodiment of the kind of struggling working guy Madec happily rides roughshod over; there to be bought and sold, bribed and threatened. But, much to the older man’s horror, Ben possesses a steely determination to survive in the punishing heat of the desert and it’s this battle of wills and wits that really elevates Beyond the Reach into an effective, tight and satisfying thriller. 

It turns out the Mojave Desert is the perfect setting for this type of story, too, its wide-open spaces, caves, hidey-holes, jagged rock formations and the late prospector’s old mine giving director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti plenty of scope to deliver some gripping set-pieces and cinematographer Russell Carpenter (True Lies, Ant-Man) an abundance of visual riches to shoot. It’s a terrible cliché to say so, but the desert is the film’s third main character, its heat, dust and forbidding terrain every bit as vital to the plot as Madec and Ben.

Rating: WWW

Beyond the Reach is in cinemas now and also available on VOD

Ratings

WWWW = Wonderful

WWW = Worthy

WW = Watchable

W = Woeful

Ant-Man’s barnstorming finale can’t disguise the fact Marvel’s movie formula is growing noticeably stale

Review

Ant-Man

Director: Peyton Reed
Starring: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll
Running time: 117mins

Exactly when did Marvel stop creating compelling villains? I only ask because the bad guy in Ant-Man – Darren Cross/Yellowjacket (Corey Stoll) – is a 24-carat dullard. He’s a one-dimensional evildoer, whose only character traits are arrogance and sneering. If he turned up in an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Daredevil you’d simply yawn and see what else was on. For such an unimaginative, lacklustre character to be front and centre in a multi-million-dollar film is pretty much unforgiveable.

Come to think of it, quite a few of Marvel’s movie villains have failed to hit the mark recently: even James Spader couldn’t make Ultron interesting in an Avengers film actually named after the character, while Ronan and Nebula were the weakest elements in the otherwise terrific Guardians of the Galaxy. Nor was Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith in Thor 2: The Dark World anything to write home about. I vaguely remember Robert Redford being quite good in the last Captain America movie but I couldn’t tell you his character’s name even with a gun to my head. Yes, I get that Loki and the Winter Soldier are great bad-guys… and that’s precisely why they stick out like a pair of sore thumbs right now.

Could it be Marvel are so distracted by introducing new characters, crossovers (Ant-Man meets the Falcon here) and cranking out movie after movie that they are neglecting the very thing that gives their heroes meaning in the first place – namely, villains that are scary, charismatic and memorable? Waiting a couple more years for Thanos to make his move frankly isn’t good enough.

In Ant-Man, Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang, an anti-corporate burglar, fresh out of prison and desperate to go straight for the sake of his young daughter, Cassie. However, when post-clink life repeatedly kicks him in the shins, he soon falls back into bad habits, agreeing to rob the home of wealthy inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). When successfully cracking Pym’s almost-impregnable vault turns up not jewels and cash but a weird rubber suit, Lang’s bad luck looks set to continue. However, it turns out the whole thing has been a set-up and that Pym and daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) want to turn him into a size-shifting superhero, code-named Ant-Man, and recruit him to their cause.

Years before Pym had created a shrinking formula then hid it in case it fell into the wrong hands. But villainous Darren Cross (a name more redolent of a Premier League midfielder than a world-class super villain) is now in charge of Pym’s old company and, worse still, is close to perfecting his own version of the miraculous potion with which he plans to do bad things. Ant-Lang – plus the army of insects he telepathically controls – must break into the company’s HQ and destroy the formula to save the world.

Peyton Reed’s film takes an age to get going. Mildly amusing comedy moments and Rudd’s easygoing charm only get you so far when the exposition comes thick and fast, and the plot creaks like one of Stan Lee’s increasingly unwelcome cameos. Worse still, Douglas and Bobby Cannavale (as the partner of Lang’s ex-wife) are wasted in lightweight supporting roles when either one would have made a great villain here. Cannavale is an extremely versatile actor whose finest role to date came not in a movie but as a monstrous senior doctor in the Showtime drama Nurse Jackie – his Dr Mike Cruz was a pent-up ball of anguish and spite who’d have eaten Yellowjacket for breakfast. And just imagine Douglas – that wicked twinkle in his eye – channelling a bit of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko or a smidgeon of ‘D-Fens’ from Falling Down, and you realise Marvel may have missed a trick…

I could also have done without two of the only people of colour in the entire film – Michael Peña and Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, playing Ant-Man's buddies/back-up – being used as little more than lazy comic relief. As Richard Lawson's review in Vanity Fair had it: "At times it seems that the only thing funny about them is that they’re not white." Meanwhile, elements of the plot – bald bad guy takes over hero’s company and attempts to use its technology for evil – seem to have been lifted straight out of Iron Man (still, incidentally, the best Marvel movie by a considerable distance).

Thankfully, a bravura final half-hour or so really pulls Ant-Man’s fat out of the fire, including as it does three visually stunning set-pieces. The punch-up between Lang and Yellowjacket in Cassie’s bedroom towards the end –  featuring both a Thomas the Tank Engine toy set and a giant ant – is easily the movie’s finest moment, mixing as it does deranged creativity, laugh-out-loud comedy and pulse-pounding action to impressive effect.

Either side of that, we get the two miniaturised antagonists beating the crap out of each other in a briefcase falling from a helicopter and Lang becoming so tiny he enters a bizarre ‘quantum universe’ (disappointingly he doesn’t encounter the Incredible Shrinking Man there). Any one of the three sequences would have been a treat but placed together – pretty much one after the other – provides a genuine rush and a terrific finale.

Most impressive of all, though, is that, unlike every other blogger and critic on the planet, I made it through my entire review without once mentioning original director Edgar Wright. Oops!

Rating: WW

Ant-Man is in cinemas now

Ratings

WWWW = Wonderful

WWW = Worthy

WW = Watchable

W = Woeful