Beyond Borders

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Its heart is in the right place, and it doesn't flinch an iota from its duty of rubbing our faces in the horror of the Third World over the past two decades.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

Makes an earnest stab at illustrating the hardships and sacrifices humanitarian workers contend with - but in the end, all the suffering merely forms an amorphous backdrop for a Harlequin romance.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The film's heart is undoubtedly in the right place, but so what? Fine ideals don't mean much when they're couched in an inert, pointless storyline.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

My advice: Skip Beyond Borders and write a check to the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The mould for all these stories of hot lust and burning cities, creamy-skinned rich girls and their bitter lovers is that grand and grotesque cinema monument, was "Gone With the Wind." You can't go there again and you shouldn't want to.

The New Yorker David Denby

There is evidence that at some point this project (which was initiated by Oliver Stone) might have been serious, but Campbell has produced little more than a churning, vivid backdrop for romance. [10 November 2003, p. 129]

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

A superior soap opera, evocative at times of Warren Beatty's "Reds."

Premiere Scott Warren

When it's all over and it's apparent that entire sections of the film are irrelevant and the paper-thin love story leaves you unsatisfied, hold your tongue, and try to remember that this film is v-e-r-y important.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

When the suffering of real children is used to enhance the image of movie stars who fall in love against the backdrop of their suffering, a certain decency is lacking. Beyond Borders wants it both ways -- glamor up front, and human misery in the background to lend it poignancy.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

As kitsch, however, it's pretty enjoyable. Jolie and Owen perform with such conviction, and the film -- blissfully unaware of its own badness -- takes its paperback-romance shenanigans with such goofy gravity, that it's easy to get caught up in the whole, soap-opera thrust of the thing.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Jolie, in this movie at least, has exactly two expressions: blank wistfulness and blank dismay. She reduces the tides of history to one more raided tomb.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

By throwing so much weight to the love story and increasingly contrived setups, the movie does what you secretly, guiltily hope it will do: It lets you off the hook.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Angelina Jolie slums her way through Beyond Borders, a film that telegraphs its plot and then drags ploddingly, its humane spirit obscured by an inane script and Jolie's implausible character.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

It's not a bad film, exactly, just a confused one, too violent to be a straight romance and too focused on aid relief to be an ass-kicking action flick.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Even assuming the best possible motives by its makers, Beyond Borders runs the risk of making human suffering exotic while glamorizing white disaster relief workers in the Third World.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Has a TV Movie of the Week righteousness about it -- you can feel the way the filmmakers and the director are struggling to educate us, even as they must surely know, deep in their hearts, that the florid, doomed romance is the real focus of the movie.

TV Guide Ken Fox

A cheesy romance tricked up in cheap sanctimony.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Of this much I'm sure: It's an awful movie.

Washington Post Jen Chaney

Unfortunately, neither Jolie nor her co-star, the rugged Clive Owen, can save this well-intentioned but astonishingly flat movie, which sinks beneath the weight of romantic cliches and pat plot developments.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Star-driven, high-minded claptrap that, fatally, can't even rig a rooting interest in its central love story.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The hard truth is that the line between being deadly earnest and unintentionally silly is thinner than these people think, and Beyond Borders turns out to be an unreal film about a real situation, unavoidably cartoonish, as was the earlier "Tears of the Sun," in its attempt to join crucial issues to ridiculous melodrama.

Village Voice Mark Holcomb

It all becomes little more than feel-good-about-feeling-bad window dressing, like an issue of "Utne Reader" in Dolby Surround Sound.

San Francisco Chronicle C.W. Nevius

A film with its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, its head is stuck so far in the clouds that it dissolves into preachy do- gooder mush.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

This is a disastrously clumsy, heavy-handed movie, one so desperate and exploitative that it resorts to putting a live grenade in the hands of a baby in order to get its message across.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Such a staggering, start-to-finish disaster that you don't know how to begin detailing its outrages and failings.

Washington Post Libby Copeland

The premise of the movie deserves better.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Send a check to UNICEF and go see "Lost In Translation," "Mystic River," or "Kill Bill" instead.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

I came out of Beyond Borders with the gnawing feeling I'd just been subjected to some sort of ghastly prank, Punk’d by the director of "GoldenEye" with Lara Croft as his willing confederate.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A sudsless soap opera with human misery as a backdrop for romantic banality.