VERTICAL LIMIT

But should it be the answer to "Why does a man make a movie about mountain climbing on the icy slopes of K2?"?

For those of you who don't know this, K2 is the second highest mountain in the world, and people come from far and wide to scale it's forbidding faces in hopes of standing at the pinnacle, taking a deep, deep breath, and maybe looking around and saying "Gosh, that was fun. Anyone seen my fingers and toes laying around anywhere?". But, being somewhat of a weekend mountaineer myself, I certainly understand the siren-song of the mountains and what lures men to the tippy-tops of them. I also know what lures men into movie theaters; the promise of thrills, excitement, and intense movie stunts and action.

And VERTICAL LIMIT, the new film from director Martin Campbell has all that.

And more.

And LESS.

I'll explain....

The story is a simple one, Chris O'Donnell plays a climber who has a traumatic experience on a family rock-climbing outing. So traumatic in fact that it has caused a rift between himself and his climbing buddy- his sister. Years go by and they drift apart and eventually they find themselves at the same camp at the base of that big old buttery hunk of mountain- K2. Sister goes off with a group of people I personally wouldn't let guide me through a bulk candy aisle at a grocery store, on a foolhardy climb up this mountain noted for bad things happening under OPTIMUM climbing conditions. So, when the weather starts to turn on them faster than a February day in Upstate New York, it's a bad, bad thing, baby. O'Donnell learns of his sister and the rest of her gang being caught between a glacier and a hard place, and he sets off with a bunch of nitwits of his own to help save her from the frozen terror that is K2. Along the way, his people learn to do two things at once, mostly screaming and dying.

You would think any movie about mountain climbing would have both highs and lows to begin with (pun certainly intended), but the highs and lows in VERTICAL LIMIT seem to be as extreme as they get, with the highs being as high as K2 itself, and the lows being lower than Gary Coleman at the Earth's core.

So, let's take a look at both, and see how this movie shakes out.........

First, the highs.

VERTICAL LIMIT is a more breathtaking than a cat sleeping on your face. It's a beautifully shot movie with some amazing scenery, most of which is white. As far as the action goes, the scenes are well done and the suspense level mounts up to a nail- biting level. The mountain is a perfect setting for the cliff-hanging, white-knuckle stunts that the movie is peppered with. Yes, loyal readers, I basically just said that a mountain is a perfect setting for a movie about mountain climbing. Hey, I'm not making you read this.

Unfortunately, the high points in this film are buried under an avalanche of low points, and not a shovel in sight.

The biggest problem with VERTICAL LIMIT is that it's just such a poorly written film. If you are going to spend a truckload of money filming a movie filled with action and stunts, take a few extra days and crank out a script that at least TRIES to hold all these expensive scenes together into a story we care to hear. VERTICAL LIMIT's dialogue and story-line are so awful that at times I wanted to put my head in the snow in embarrassment. As sketchy as the story is, it COULD have been saved with some believable dialogue to make us suspend our disbelief and sit back with wild-eyed wonder. But instead, the film makers assume we will digest anything that is fed to us, and some of the things fed to us in VERTICAL LIMIT a 5 year old couldn't get down with 2 glasses of Ovaltine and a beating.

Character development is sloppy to the point of non-existent. Yes, we DO get a good dose of the strife between O'Donnell and his sister following their ill-fated family hike with Dad in the opening thrill shot, but so many of the other characters seem like something cut and pasted from Movie-Making 101. Get out the cookie-cutter...... we need action movie characters. One by one we meet the climbers on the big rescue operation, and we know that each and every one of them is not coming back. They may as well all be wearing the red uniforms from Star Trek or be on a space ship with Sigourney Weaver. In fact, many of the faces are those "hey, it's the guy from......" TV faces, which only adds to their disposability in the film. When we see "the guy who played Dr. Bashir on DEEP SPACE NINE" give his moving speech about going on the rescue mission to help find his brother, or son, or Uncle, or neighbor, or whoever the hell he was supposed to be, who MIGHT still be alive, it makes us wonder who the guy was to begin with, as virtually no time was spent developing this man we are suddenly supposed to care so much about. When we see "the guy who play Krychek on THE X-FILES" we have a similar reaction, and so it goes as we meet the rest of the rag-tag bunch of misfits in O'Donnell's team.

But the biggest script-turd in the film is the poor development of the characters played by Scott Glenn and Bill Paxton, two actors I've always had a great deal of admiration for. Glenn plays an incense burning hiking guru who looks like he'd be more at home smoking hash under a black velvet Jerry Garcia poster than on K2, and Paxton plays a millionaire business tycoon who is hiking K2 as a (get this) publicity stunt for his new business venture (I'm not making this up). That makes about as much sense as Bill Gates swimming the English Channel to promote a new version of windows. It sounds stupid in this review, and it REALLY sounds stupid when the movie tells us all about what a cool idea it is. To make matters worse, along the way some very minor drama between these two characters, which gets easily forgotten once we start stunt watching, turns out to be some major movie-turn- of-events-changing plot point that comes back from so far out of left field that it made me wonder if I had slept through something important.

Add all of these ingredients into the soup and stir thoroughly, and the final product is something that would have made a great show on the Discovery Channel about Hollywood stunt men and the amazing things they can do with snow and explosives (did I mention that each of the rescue team is carrying NITRO that looks like it was safety-packaged by a kindergarten class, and that it all is supposed to make sense?), yet when added to the horrible framework that is the story and dialogue, it makes VERTICAL LIMIT harder to swallow than a pair of snowshoes coated with peanut butter.

And yet it's a fun movie at times. Go figure.

VERTICAL LIMIT is entertaining as hell on many levels, just not the levels that make it memorable. The makers of this film set out to make a rollercoaster of a movie, and much like a rollercoaster, you have to take the highs along with the lows.

Until next time, the balcony is condemned (due to ice load).

Dr. Torgo