20
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.
We hate to say it, but we can't find anywhere to view this film.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
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.
30
Los Angeles Times by 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.
40
The Hollywood Reporter by 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.
40
Dallas Observer by 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.
50
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.
50
Entertainment Weekly by 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.
50
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.
40
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.
30
Star-driven, high-minded claptrap that, fatally, can't even rig a rooting interest in its central love story.