Echoes of Cecil the lion in big hunt chiller
THE tragic tale of Cecil the lion, killed for sport by a wealthy American dentist, gives chase thriller Beyond The Reach a timely relevance. Michael Douglas plays the arrogant John Madec, a corporate fat cat with a penchant for shooting big cats.
On a hunting expedition to the Mojave desert he hires a young local tracker, Ben (Jeremy Irvine), and the two set off in Madec’s powerful truck.
Madec does not have a valid licence to shoot game. But a hefty bribe persuades Ben to turn a blind eye, and he then finds himself colluding in an even bigger coverup, after Madec accidentally shoots an eccentric old hermit.
When Madec tries to pin the shooting on him, however, Ben realises he’s in cahoots with a monster. Madec sends him nearnaked into the desert, knowing that he
cannot survive the intense heat for long. But he hasn’t reckoned on Ben’s intimate knowledge of the terrain.
It’s tense, starkly shot and for the most part cleverly done, and it doesn’t really matter that you could occasionally drive Madec’s tank-like truck through the holes in the plot, or even that the denouement is more than a little ludicrous.
Douglas is on top, sneering form, and Irvine, the British actor who went through the mill in The Railway Man as a wartime prisoner of the Japanese, does a similarly fine job of suffering here.
In THE week’s other hot pursuit, the suffering is endured by the audience. Hot Pursuit throws together Reese Witherspoon and sofia Vergara — the former as a hapless, fusspot cop, the latter as the glamorous gangster’s moll she must transport safely to court to give evidence against a Mr Big — in a transparent attempt to generate the kind of odd-couple chemistry that sizzled between Robert de niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run (1988).
Director Anne Fletcher was doubtless also thinking of the comic rapport between sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in The Heat (2013), and so was I, but only in a forlorn, nostalgic kind of way.
Witherspoon has made some astute choices recently, but this isn’t one of them.
With its lazy, sexist jokes about menstruation (men are revolted by it) and lesbianism (men are turned on by it), and both leads straining tiresomely for laughs, it’s no wonder the funniest bits are the final-credits out-takes.
Which, by the way, aren’t very funny.