Review of Vertical Limit

Introduction

It has to be said, things don’t bode well: a millennial stab at the much beleaguered mountain movie sub-sub-genre (um, has there even been a good one?) with a cast populated almost entirely by C or D-list celebs like Chris O’Donnell and Scott Glenn and a plastic, sentimental plot which is basically a snow-swept redux of ‘Saving Private Ryan’. In a vain attempt to up the ante, director Martin Campbell (‘Goldeneye’, ‘The Mask of Zorro’) plunders the CGI box of goodies for some ludicrously colourful action set-pieces, and some outlandish stunt effects.

Video

Ignoring for a moment Martin Campbell’s rather atrocious direction and David Tattersall’s obscenely radiant colour palette, this is as impressive a transfer as one would expect from a film released earlier this year: excellent contrast, near flawless definition and precisely zero artifacts. Sadly, I can’t complain.

Audio

Explosions. Shouting. Crying. Screaming. Deep breathing. Torrential storms. Helicopters. Avalanches. In other words, ‘Vertical Limit’ is one noisy bitch. The preposterous score dominates with infuriating excess, but, as with the video, there isn’t much room for complaint.

Features

The basics: Trailers for ‘Vertical Limit’, ‘The Mask of Zorro’ and ‘All the Pretty Horses’ as well as some Cast/crew filmogs. An All-American 13 minute doco about true expeditions up K2, mostly featuring Brit-failures and heroic Yanks. Its short enough to be just about watchable, but with lines like: “The true triumph is life itself”, the temptation to hit the stop button is almost too great. The best feature is probably “Search and Rescue Tales”, a series of short documentaries (about 30 minutes in total) which covers most aspects of the production. Which, incidentally, renders the usual 25 minute ‘Making of’ rather redundant. Finally, there’s a vaguely hokey commentary from Campbell and Producer Lloyd Philips, which includes fascinating discussions about the colours of tents.

Conclusion

Hilariously awful. After pitching deer old pa’ off a cliff-face in ‘Cliffhanger’-esque prologue, pretty mountain boy O’Donnell turns to slacker-stubble, mild mullet and wildlife photography in Nepal. For reasons too mind-numbingly contrived to go into here, he bumps into sis’ (Robin Tunney) who’s still harboring feelings of survivor guilt because of dead dad. Cue frequent scenes of constipated on-the-nose ‘emotional’ dialogue straight from the worst daytime soap. For all our sakes, they should have gone fishing.

Tunney trots up K2 with apparently psychotic capitalist playboy Bill Paxton and, natch, get caught in a noisy, but highly unconvincing storm and have to be rescued by ‘retired’ O’Donnell and his gang of mountaineering desperados (ie, avalanche fodder). From the perversely amusing comedic poetry of the opening scene, the goofball stupidity of this almost unspeakably inept production has to be seen to be believed: lots of orange explosions, banal philosophizing, lumbering exposition and characters hiking around at one step per minute amongst polystyrene snow, studio-bound sets, Chroma-key backgrounds and wind machines. Tunney’s multitude of strained facial expressions are frankly baffling, O’Donnell looks like he’s borrowed an action hero’s hair and wandered on set without anyone noticing. Meanwhile Paxton should be greeted with stifled guffaws for a performance that is, lets just say, a mite overwrought.

Best of all though is scraggly Buddhist climbing sage Scott Glenn, who guides the intrepid mountain movies’ stereotypes to predictable deaths while saying things like: “up there, you’re not dying. You’re DEAD”. One can’t help but wonder if he cut his hair and had a bath he’d wash his lanky pearls of wisdom away. The impressively high body count is something to be marveled, particularly given the outrageous selfishness of the end result (the writers could do with reading a spot of Utilitarianism.) A generous amount of unintentional chuckles then, but still almost indescribably bad.