The Promise is visually arresting and befittingly nostalgic, but no where near enough so to warrant or rectify the film’s atrociously underdeveloped protagonists and threadbare plot. Director Terry George fails to materialize the sobering and engrossing pathos elicited by genre heavyweights like Schindler’s List and, to a certain extent, George’s own Hotel Rwanda. As a result, The Promise falls subsequently flat.

Co-writers George and Robin Swicord’s (heavily revised) vision of a whimsical, fleeting love-triangle trope backdropped by the Armenian genocide is as bad a narrative combination as it reads, exploiting the atrocity and its victims as mere devices of tragedy in an attempt to humanize characters that scarcely qualify as people that are even remotely worthy of triggering compassion. The only genuine humanness residing in the otherwise haughty film is its desire to produce a movie that’s accessible and informative regarding the plight of the Armenian people.