It’s hard to be too critical of a movie that says, “She’s French-Canadian; on the days she’s Canadian, she can be quite pleasant.”
Seven years ago the Sylvester Stallone/Rennie Harlin action yarn Cliffhanger earned back its budget fourfold. Now the 1993 iteration of the young demographic comprising the meat of Hollywood’s target audience is likely too busy, jaded, and/or poor to be seeing as many movies. Since there’s little danger of alienating the bulk of current moviegoers by repeating the mountain-climbing theme again – voila.
Vertical Limit does have more than height in common with its predecessor. It’s got a now-reluctant mountaineer who dropped someone in the first scene. There are no millions in cash, but there is an unscrupulous billionaire. And there’s helicopter trouble. Lots of helicopter trouble. It ups the ante by setting the story on a much taller mountain (K-2 in Pakistan’s Karakoram range; almost as tall as Everest, it’s considered a more difficult, precipitous ascent) and having a character jump as far as Stallone did in a Cliffhanger scene that test audiences found so laughably improbable it was cut from the final version. Oh, one more thing – there are no guns, but in order to blast open an ice cave, it’s got plenty of nitroglycerin. Yeehah.
Chris O’Donnell and Robin Tunney (End of Days) play Peter and Annie Garrett, sibling climbers estranged for three years since the death of their father in a somewhat questionable accident. Now she’s helping a Texas rich guy (Bill Paxton) do K-2 as a publicity stunt – which goes bad, prompting Peter to strap on the lanyards again. He enlists a Pakistani guide (bearded, unrecognizable Alexander Siddig, who was the doctor on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”), a couple randy Brits, the aforementioned Franco-Canuck wench, and most importantly a grizzled old Howard Hughes-looking rock ape (Scott Glenn, who really deserves to be in more movies than Chris O’Donnell does) who has history both with Peter’s dad and the billionaire.
Vertical Limit is loaded with enough gravity-induced peril and asthmatic frostbite to make the action almost unforgivably relentless, which is fine if you go for that kind of thing. But it gets to the point where you can almost set your watch by each scene where somebody hangs from a rope over the edge of the world and “—can’t – quite – reach…“ The last person to see this much dangling was probably the college professor who tried diagramming sentences from President Bush II’s masters thesis. By the time this movie is over, the only surprise is that the people trapped in the cave don’t run into a man-eating yeti to add that last little bit of peril. Director Martin Campbell (Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro) has constantly got stuff blowin’ up, slidin’ down, and fallin’ off. But VL does have a neat cast (also along, in a good-guy role for a change, is Nicolas Lea, that weasel Krycek from “X-Files”), and manages to juggle (literally) plenty of characters, most of whom are pleasantly interesting. It’s also good to see depicted a bit of the world – the disputed Kashmir region between Pakistan and India – that most Americans couldn’t identify in a Jay Leno quiz. B-