Beyond Borders has an obvious alternate title that I'm sure I'm not going to be the first critic to think of, but a much more apt title for this excuse to get Angelina Jolie in the bush would've been Beyond Boredom. The film plays out in three distinct vignettes and the only real topic of debate after leaving the theater was which one was more painfully pointless.

Beyond Borders is extremely thought-provoking film making - thoughts like "shouldn't something be happening," and "why hasn't anything happened yet." Which leads to thoughts of an early exit after it becomes apparent that after the second vignette you will be expected to sit through a third.

The film begins in 1984 where we find Jolie playing an American who lives in London with her husband Linus Roache. Roache is the son of a well-known and respected philanthropist, but Jolie is attracted to the hands-on humanitarian work being carried out in the field by the sexy and brave Clive Owen. Owen is a doctor who's been moved by too many Sally Struthers commercials and has chucked it all to get on out there where the real help is needed. (I don't mean to poke fun at Sally Struthers or philanthropy) I mean to make fun of this ridiculously stilted and dull film.

In what at first appears to be a plot development, Jolie decides to join Owen in his quest to help the unfortunate, so she raises some money and travels to Ethiopia. If anyone gets excited about this development it would have to be the mosquitoes checking out those blood swollen lips arriving in camp.

Owen and Jolie, of course begin to develop feelings for one another, but not in any sort of a way that you could call plot advancement. It's all just implied and smoldering. Then before anything can happen she heads back off to London where we discover it's now 1989, where does the time go when you're checking your watch every few seconds? After having a son with her husband, she soon gets the do-gooder bug again and before you know it she's back out in the field with Owen's gang - this time in the jungles of Cambodia. Where the staffers become mixed up in some stuff involving warlords, a baby and a grenade, but again they manage to avoid any sort of entanglement with a plot. There is a little more sexual tension between Jolie and the mosquitoes, oh yea and Owen

I tell you what, if you're one of those folks who worships the ground Angelina Jolie treads upon, then I'm not going to spoil the location of the third vignette - I don't want to ruin everything. In fact I'm not even going to tell you if anything happens there. Let's leave this baby a cliff-hanger. It's not that the acting is necessarily the problem, they're just literally given nothing to do and not much more to say.

Srangely, Martin Campbell has directed action films before, including The Mask of Zorro, Vertical Limit, and GoldenEye. So it's fair to say that he's familiar with the concept of things happening for the audience to watch, why he chose to leave that particular element out of Beyond Borders is beyond me.