Martin Campbell has something of an impressive record when it comes to bringing back faded actioners to their former glories. After all, not only did he resurrect James Bond with Goldeneye, but he pulled off the even trickier coup of introducing Zorro to a whole new generation even if it meant that we got Anthony Hopkins playing a Mexican. However, while the director showed an aptitude to staging clean, simple to follow, action that also proved to be tremendously exciting, he seemed to have less luck with action movies that were based off of original plots with the noticable offender being the snow bound adventure thriller, Vertical Limit.
Essentially Cliffhanger with all the Die Hard rung out of it, the movie attempted to be a rip roaring ride that skirted along the borders of the disaster movie in order to stage a daring, if utterly illogical rescue but faced an avalanche of disinterest upon its release. But after all this time, is Vertical Limit the Mount Everest of disappointments or is it time to scale the sheer face of the film for a long overdue reappraisal?
Strap on the nitro, it may be something of a tough slog to the top.
After the type of traumatic past that all 85% of all protagonists in rock climbing movies have to experience by law, Peter Garrett has renounced scaling rock faces and instead has chosen the far more horizontal life of photographing wildlife in the wake of his father’s death. On the flip side, his estranged sister Annie used the scarring tragedy to double down on climbing up vast mountains to be chosen to join an expedition to climb K2 funded by charismatic and wealthy industrialist Elliot Vaughn. After a chance reunion that turns out to be as awkward as you’d expect, Peter watches his sister head off on her climb while he starts to get acquainted with the various oddballs and eccentrics that populate base camp such as the world weary Monique, crass Aussie brothers Cyril and Malcolm and grizzled, mountain dwelling recluse Montgomery Wick who lost his wife to K2 years before.
However, it seems that despite his wholesome, public persona, Vaughn turns out to be something of a driven prick and after gaslighting his team into forging on after multiple storm warnings, he, Annie and expedition leader Tom are left trapped in a crevasse after disaster strikes and the only way to get them out is if multiple teams of climbers attempt different routes to their positions in order to blast them out of their icy prison with canisters of worryingly unstable nitro.
As unnecessarily dangerous as this sounds, Peter, Monique, Cyril, Malcolm and native Kareem all head out for their insanely treacherous mission, hoping to beat the pulmonary edema that’s starting to ravage the respiratory systems of the survivors – but more pressing than the cold or a bunch of backpacks that could go boom at any second, is the fact that Vaughn will stoop to any lengths to survive, even murder.
If you had to describe the various ingredients that go up to comprise Vertical Limit’s frankly bizarre genetic make up, I’d have to say that is was the unholy union of Cliffhanger and Wages Of Fear with a heaped serving of 70s disaster movie histrionics thrown in for good measure. However, while Campbell’s snowy epic seems extraordinarily eager to please back in 2000, it constantly seemed to be thwarting it’s own effectiveness thanks to a mixture of some shockingly bad green screen work and the story carrying all the narrative logic of an episode of Muppet Babies, which feels twice as apparent when compared to such deadly serious movies such as 2015s Everest and the harrowingly thrilling documentary, Touching The Void. However, time has a funny way of sanding down those more jagged edges and to watch Vertical Limit now, with no real expectations whatsoever, reveals the flick to be an endearingly brainless adventure that demands to be seen with the most vocal crowd you can get your hands on.
For a start, Campbell seems determined to have nothing in this movie go to plan at all right from the word go and paints the world of mountain climbing as so incredibly rife with sudden death at any moment, you feel that the characters would be far safer in a Final Destination movie instead. This is all laid out in the opening sequence in which thing go so bad, so fast in such a dramatic way, the tragic accident that claims the life of Peter and Annie’s father can’t help but be anything other than inadvertently hysterical – right down to the thoroughly unnecessary exclanation point where we get a beat of pure serenity before his body thuds into the ground. From here it only gets worse – Chris O’Donnel’s rather insipid Peter is only able to uncomfortably reunite with Tobin Tunney’s sister because his fellow photographer snaps his leg like a breadstick in a freak accident, the party of Bill Paxton’s snivelling CEO is only trapped because he’s too much of an arse to turn back in the face of a superstorm and the helicopter delivering the would-be rescuers suddenly goes wildly out of control, leaving our hopeful heroes (which includes an unnervingly young Ben Mendelson) dangling wildly over an abyss while Goldeneye’s Izabella Scorupco is menaced by a whirring rotor blade.
It’s utterly chaotic and this all occurs before we find out the nitro is so unstable it can be set off by fucking daylight, but you can tell that Campbell is getting a massive kick hurling stunt performers around with reckless abandon while his cadre of character actors each do precisely what they were hired for. However, the tone is so broad and the stakes so amusingly high, it’s ludicrous nature often manages to wrestle any real tension into submission and any time a hint of metaphorical gravity manages to sneak by the rambunctious action, it’s cold-cocked without mercy by some below-average, 2000s CGI that manages to strip the movie of its greatest asset – it’s tough to invoke vertigo when you can tell the actors are dangling above a soundstage. In fact, the movies first shot is that of possibly the most obviously digital eagle in cinema history which instantly gives any sense of realism a crippling punch to the kidneys before we’ve even been introduced to any of the actors.
However, if you take Vertical Limit on the playing field it’s intended for – e.g. a thoroughly idiotic action romp that’s merely to be enjoyed like junk food for the adrenaline glands – the film is frequently a genuine giggle, right down to Scott Glen’s toeless, hermit, Wick, who seems to practice pacifist beliefs but is also well up for murdering Bill Paxton because he holds him responsible for his wife’s death after – get this – he discovers her body, perfectly preserved, when it’s uncovered by a nearby explosion.
Questionable physics, butchered logic and an impressively low survival rate for the cast means that is you choose to take Vertical Limit seriously and you’re in for a rather ungainly climb, but treat it as the absurd, bubble gum, adventure it’s obviously meant to be and you’ll reach the summit with a minimum of fuss.
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