"Throughout its two-hour plus running time, there is nary an explanation of the political machinations behind the persecution of the Armenians. There's a bit of chit-chat and singing with some German soldiers, a mean Turkish father, and then suddenly everyone's being executed and shipped off to labor camps while villages burn. The lack of exposition could be intended to align us with Mikael's naive perspective. But you'll definitely leave "The Promise" with far more questions than you started. Perhaps we can never really answer why one group commits genocide against another, but it feels slightly irresponsible to make a film ostensibly shedding light on this atrocity and then not attempt to explain it in the least. Instead, "The Promise" is mostly concerned with the love triangle between Ana, Mikael and Chris, the reporter. And even the love triangle itself is a disappointment, as these men never seem too concerned that the other is romancing his girl. The usually charismatic Isaac is saddled with a dud of a character. Mikael spends most of the film buffeted by forces beyond his control and deferring to the desires of others, such as the army and his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo). It's not until the third act that he starts to make his own decisions. The swaggering heroics are left to Bale as the Hemingway-esque American foreign correspondent."