Beyond the Reach: Deadly, desert-set game of cat and mouse misses mark

Beyond the Reach, adapted from the same Robb White Deathwatch novel that spawned the 1974 Andy Griffith-starring television movie Savages, is a deadly, desert-set game of cat and mouse that is tired and beyond plausibility.

Michael Douglas plays a smug, slick financier and trophy hunter named Horton Madec – of course he does – who hires a hunky, heartbroken young guide named Ben (played vacantly by War Horse's Jeremy Irvine) to help him rifle down a bighorn sheep.

When Madec kills an old prospector by mistake, a highly manipulated plot happens, involving Ben taking off his shirt – for you, ladies – and being left to perish in the desert while Douglas's Madec keeps close eye and restrained pursuit.

"I'm not going to kill you," Madec says, "I'm going to watch you die."

One imagines director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti told Douglas much the same thing.