The superhero genre has been reaching saturation point for a while now, but outside of the major players like Marvel and DC, it’s hard to find many movies that take a completely unique and novel approach to the standard tropes. From the outside looking in, though, 2018’s Beyond the Edge had no shortage of potential.
A superpowered sci-fi heist caper sounds like an ingenious concoction on paper, with a lifelong gambler gathering together a crew of people with unique abilities to help him secure a lucrative casino haul. However, when another player enters the game with gifts of their own that make the ragtag group of mystics, telepaths, telekenetics, and hypnotists look like amateurs by comparison, the long con is well and truly on.
Beyond the Edge did fly almost completely under the radar when it first released in March of 2018, with co-directors Aleksandr Boguslavskiy and Francesco Cinquemani’s ambitious effort only earning a little over a million dollars at the box office, which may have been partly explained away by the fact it’s not very good.
Antonio Banderas is also there for some reason – presumably to pick up a paycheck for phoning it in based on his lifeless performance – but the Russian-backed genre-bender nobody even knew existed has nonetheless secured a winning hand on streaming this week, after FlixPatrol revealed Beyond the Edge to be one of the most-watched features on the iTunes global charts.
If anyone wants to pilfer the premise for a remake that’s halfway decent, then we’d be among the first to get in line.
Published: May 18, 2023 11:23 am