Beyond Rangoon

Directed by John Boorman, Beyond Rangoon follows grieving American Laura Bowman (Patricia Arquette) as she finds herself inadvertently caught up in Burma’s deadly pro-democracy uprising of the late 1980s. It’s promising subject matter that’s employed to earnest yet hopelessly underwhelming effect by Boorman, as the filmmaker, working from Alex Lasker and Bill Rubenstein’s often hilariously unsubtle screenplay, delivers a heavy-handed drama that’s suffused with a whole host of feeble, incompetent elements – with, especially, Arquette’s wildly over-the-top and often shockingly unconvincing performance perpetuating (and exacerbating) the picture’s arms-length atmosphere. (It doesn’t help, certainly, that all or most of Arquette’s dialogue has been inexplicably dubbed over, which only heightens the terminally flat nature of her work here.) And while the film admittedly boasts a very small handful of mildly tense sequences, Beyond Rangoon‘s frustratingly simple-minded modus operandi diminishes the impact of its message and, ultimately, transforms it into a hopelessly didactic mess – with the uplifting conclusion, it goes without saying, finally unable to pack the emotional, cathartic punch for which Boorman is obviously striving.

*1/2 out of ****