It's okay for a movie to be silly and goofy. Heck, most movies could benefit from being sillier and goofier than they are, particularly films like Jean-Baptiste Léonetti's Beyond the Reach. Unfortunately, while Léonetti's film is never less than ridiculous, it forgets to also be fun. Young Ben (the hunky Jeremy Irvine) is hired to be the guide for the ostentatiously wealthy Madec (Michael Douglas) as he ventures into the desert to shoot at living things. When one of those living things accidentally turns out to be a human, Madec begins hunting Ben to ensure his silence. The sluggish Beyond the Reach suffers from a lack of chemistry between its leads; Douglas knows when to amp up the moustache-twirling villainy, but the frequently-shirtless Irvine doesn't even project as much personality as an Abercrombie model. Curiously enough, the picture is thematically similar to this week's much, much better Clouds of Sils Maria, which is also about the dysfunctional relationship between two people of vastly different ages in a remote location. And as for films about hunting the most dangerous game (the "game" being humans in hunting parlance, as opposed to the act of hunting being the game), Beyond the Reach can't touch Christopher Denham's recent Preservation, which shows how to do it right.
