Vertical Limit

VERTICAL LIMIT

Rating: B-

Vertical Limit does for mountain climbing what Jaws did for swimming in the ocean. After seeing this film, I canceled my weekend excursion to Mt. Kilimanjaro. The joy of conquering a mountain "because it is there" just didn't seem worth the risk that I'd end up dangling over the edge of a precipice by a thin rope.

And if there's one thing this movie teaches you, it's the inevitability that every mountaineer who ever hitches on a carabiner will sooner or later end up dangling helplessly by a thin rope. Make that a thin rope whose anchor point is slowly pulling loose. In the film's opening scene, brother and sister Chris O'Donnell and Robin Tunney are scaling a vertical rockface with their father and a couple of others. Faster than you can say "have a nice trip, see you next fall," one of the team slips and goes plummeting to his death. It's times like these when having the whole team hitched to the same rope can be a bad idea in retrospect. To make a long story short, Dad ends up dangling beneath O'Donnell, who dangles beneath Tunney, who dangles beneath a rock anchor, which happens to be slowly slipping. (See what I mean?) Dad screams for O'Donnell to cut him loose, thus saving O'Donnell and his sister. Reluctantly, O'Donnell obeys. Instant inner conflict for the remainder of the movie.

Most people would be unlucky enough to face such a moral quandary once in their life. But this exact "do we kill someone to save the rest of us" dilemma keeps surfacing over and over again in this film. When Tunney participates in an expedition to scale K-2 with billionaire Bill Paxton, you can bet your bottom dollar they'll end up stranded on the mountain top, and brother O'Donnell will have to come and rescue them. First of all, you'd think Tunney would have learned her lesson from the first fiasco. Second of all, as I watched this film I realized I can't tell the difference between Chris O'Donnell and Matthew McConaughey, and now strongly suspect they're the same person. (Hey, the guy calling himself Dustin Hoffman in some films and Al Pacino in others got away with it for years.) To make matters worse, O'Donnell has the bright idea that each member of the rescue team should scale the mountain with a bottle of nitroglycerine strapped to his back. As soon as they decide to split up into three teams of two, you just know someone's gonna fall down and go boom! ("Let's split up" is Hollywood parlance for "some of us aren't going to make it back to camp, and I'd rather it be just you guys than all of us.") By the way, here's a tip: never pack your nitro inside Pakastani containers - the darn things leak like sieves.

Vertical Limit is chock-full of exciting action sequences, and lots of stunts and visual effects which will make you wonder how they filmed them in real life (hint: trick photography). But as we gleefully watch one narrow brush with disaster followed by another, things begin to get repetitious. The screenwriters seem to sense this, and introduce awkward subplots involving a previous Paxton expedition, and Scott Glenn as a gristly mountaineer with murky motives, but in the end the movie is not made better - just more contrived.