The Promise Reviews

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, the cultural and historical background was definitely really interesting but, to be honest, I still didn’t care much about the damned thing though. Indeed, they should have provided more details explaining more what happened back then. I mean, during the opening scene, the main character mentioned that he was living in peace in his village, regardless of the fact if his neighbors were Christian or Muslim. But, pretty much out of nowhere, you got to see some Turkish people rioting in the streets but what was exactly their beef against the Armenian community? Unfortunately, instead of focusing on this tragedy which really deserves to get more attention after decades of denial from the Turkish government and Turkey in general, they gave us a whole bunch of rather bland characters. I mean, pretty much like in ‘Jin líng shí san chai’, Christian Bale ended up playing a completely superfluous American character who could have been easily removed. To make things worse, most of these characters were involved in not 1 but 2 really tedious love triangles and they even gave us a ‘Titanic’-like ending which was rather pathetic. Eventually, the strongest scene was probably the one during which Mikael Boghosian discovered that his whole village, including his pregnant wife, had been killed but while such tragic events should have been the focus of this movie, it was constantly undermined by some really underwhelming soapy love intrigues. Anyway, to conclude, even if this movie was not really good, it was still dealing with an important page of history and, only therefore, I think it is worth a look though.