There comes a time for every actor whose career has been based on a single character type when that character is done, when it’s been wrung out of every last drop of significance. At this point, the actor must adapt and expand their repertoire or retire and move on to other things.
Michael Douglas has reached such a point. This much is clear in Beyond the Reach, that the 70-year-old’s smug, abrasive onscreen persona is exhausted. It doesn’t help that Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s downbeat film is so ill conceived, making no good use of the Douglas Type. Here he’s called Madec, and he’s a ruthless, big-city financial insurer, introduced on the eve of a hugely complex deal that will sell his company to a Chinese conglomerate for $140 million.
For reasons unknown, he decides this is the perfect time to go big game hunting in the Mojave Desert. And so he heads out in a Batmobile-like Mercedes Supertank, with automated everything (the film offers a modicum of humor in the sight of Madec enjoying his morning coffee made in the car’s deluxe espresso machine), a high-powered assault rifle, and an extremely fat wallet, diverting his journey back to California long enough to bag a big horn.
No surprise, he has no permit to do this, but instead, pays off the sheriff of a small town on the edge of a huge national park. Also predictably, he enlists the aid of a troubled sidekick, Ben (Jeremy Irvine), dubbed “the best tracker in the state”. It happens that Ben is nursing a broken heart, as his longtime girlfriend Laina (Hanna Mangan Lawrence) has just left him to attend college in Colorado.
Together, the two men embark into the wilderness, but it soon becomes clear Madec’s recklessness will clash with Ben’s methodical approach, and so it comes to pass, when a shooting goes horribly wrong and an aging drifter is killed. Madec forces Ben to strip down and run out into the desert until he drops from dehydration, in order to be more easily framed for the murder. At least that’s the stated goal. We might surmise that the real reason is so that the film can set up its utterly depleted cat-and-mouse premise.
In order that this plot gear can grind, Madec can’t just wait for the kid to bake in the desert. Rather, he stalks him from a distance with his super-car, enjoying full meals and daily shaves as Ben struggles to stay alive in the heat. When Ben manages to sneak away and hide out in a small series of caves while Madec — who is, you recall, smug and abrasive — drinks expensive booze from a decanter and then shines his car’s bank of spotlights up the side of the cliff so that he can throw lit sticks of dynamite in Ben’s general direction and cackle incomprehensibly: “Fool me once,” he declares, “shame on you. Fool me twice, I keel you!”
The film continues along this path, piling on preposterous coincidences, pointless red herrings, all to perpetuate the fundamental illogic of this well-known plot, that the villain is completely unable to vanquish his helpless prey. In the unfortunately titled Beyond the Reach, the cat is so brain-locked, it can’t even figure out how it wants to dispose of the mouse.
Through all these shenanigans, Douglas gamely rehearses the persona that got him here, exposing just how far he has sunk from the heady days of Wall Street, The Game, and Wonder Boys, films in which his smirking arrogance would eventually come face to face with his fear of being cut down to size. Gone now is that tension, and in its place, we confront an empty shell of abject egotism. We have no idea what make Madec go, he’s never explored, only exploited, a super-wealthy boogieman, appearing in one scene as a shadowy dream apparition who transforms into a very scary monster.
The idea here is that Madec’s limitless financial resources make him every bit as phantasmal and inexorable as Jason Voorhees. It’s an idea that might be timely, except that it’s old, and Douglas has helped to make it so. It’s no help that in addition to playing the lead role, he’s also one of this movie’s producers. The artist who once helped greenlight One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has now officially flown the coop.