Beyond Borders

An expatriate American socialite in London (Angelina Jolie) has her eyes opened to worldwide suffering by trotting along behind a doctor (Clive Owen) as he jets around to famine hot spots every few years: Ethiopia in 1984, Cambodia in 1989 and Chechnya in 1995. There’s something both paltry and self-righteous about the way Caspian Tredwell-Owen’s script drapes shreds of liberal chic over a formless plot scavenged from old movies—from Casablanca and The Nun’s Story to Doctor Zhivago and The Killing Fields. The mixture fails to ignite mainly because the chemistry between Jolie and Owen is close to nil. They’re hardly in the same movie; she’s like a model posing dramatically in her Giorgio Armani wilderness-explorer duds, while he’s like a drunken soccer fan bellowing at some unseen referee.