But when he decides it’s time to turn over a new leaf and retire to the English countryside, he’s promptly double-crossed by his dastardly employer, Charles Kemp ( John Rhys-Davies). William Reynolds (Andrew Cheney) is a skilled 18th-century assassin who’s cut a bloody swath through India on the orders of the hugely powerful and corrupt British East India Company. Rolling out in more than 100 theaters after profitable four-wall and VOD exposure, this Kickstarter-funded, $4 million-budget effort should benefit from its unusually ambitious action-adventure approach, but seems unlikely to match the grassroots success of Freestyle’s 2014 hit “God’s Not Dead.” The mixed result feels like a half-glass affair all around: Production values are well above the faith-based-indie average, if still somewhat deficient in texture and atmosphere and the script is preachy in ways that will be wholly acceptable to its target audience (and perhaps even a few non-believers who stumble in by accident), yet still so simplistically and creakily plotted that dramatic excitement and character complexity remain firmly at bay. A British mercenary’s rocky road to redemption (and romance) leads him into the very heart of the American Revolution in director Chad Burns’ “Beyond the Mask,” a mostly stiff, infrequently stirring attempt to furnish a swashbuckling historical yarn for Christian audiences.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |