'The Promise' fails to deliver

Reviewing the budget for a film as expensive, and doomed, as The Promise perhaps feels like a low blow. Everything it's trying to be - a David Lean-ian historical epic set against the barely-addressed backdrop of the 1915 Armenian genocide - needs scale, heft and star power. These are pricey. The film cost some $90-million (R1.1-billion).

It's touchingly played, in its better moments, and plunges us into the era's heartbreak with emotional force. What it lacks is original artistry, or a foreground story worth all the fuss.

WATCH the trailer for The Promise

The script feels like holding copy: insert love quadrangle here, open windows here, here and here on the pogrom against the Armenian people which Turkey still denies occurred.

So, on the eve of World War 1, Turkish-Armenian apothecary Mikael (Oscar Isaac) travels from his family's village to train as a doctor in Constantinople, using the dowry he has won by proposing to a rich neighbour's daughter (Angela Sarafyan).

In the city, he falls in love with Charlotte le Bon's Ana, a beautiful, bewildered dance teacher who is herself pledged to Chris (Christian Bale), an American war reporter just beginning to learn of the evacuations, and worse, being visited against the Ottoman Empire's Armenian populace.

The two couples are thrown hither and thither by the ensuing chaos, witnesses to mass slaughter who rarely feel like active agents in anything much. Just when this passivity is becoming a problem, director Terry George stages an unconvincing scrap with Ottoman soldiers.

The actors aren't to blame, even if Isaac, with his Omar Sharif-like brooding presence, is eventually defeated by his multiple scenes of wailing and grief. Mikael's desperate ride on a night-time transport train, which turns out to be hastening his starving people to their fates, is one of the few sequences whose cinematic vigour a Minghella or Spielberg might have signed off on.

Nobly intended as it may all be, it's a little too lifeless to hit home. - The Daily Telegraph

• This article was originally published in The Times.