Downhill slide

If you felt so inclined, you could divide all fiction films into two broad, general categories. First, there are those movies that invite us to vicariously experience the impossible, to identify with characters doing things we know we cannot and never will do, like thwarting evil alien empires or having sex with Denise Richards. The other group consists of films that trade on the merely improbable, showing our surrogates engaged in activities that are, at least theoretically, within reach of just about anybody, like winning the lottery or having sex with Charlie Sheen.
You'd think mountain climbing movies would fall into the second category. After all, there really are mountains (not in Georgia, obviously, Georgia only has ambitious hills), and some people occasionally really do climb them. And these people often have real adventures, falling into crevasses and freezing to death and eating dead soccer players and so forth. But however hard the topographical fact of mountains might be, the climbing genre, if genre it is, has had a conspicuously wide streak of fantasy running through it ever since lithe, lovely Leni Riefenstahl gamboled through papier-mâaché Alps in her carefree pre-Nazi days.
Mountain climbing movies have never been as big here in the States as they were in pre-war Germany (they were hard-up for laughs, those pre-war Germans), but you can pretty much count on someone trotting out a climbing drama every few years. And for whatever reason, time and time again, the makers of these movies seem to feel that authentic peaks and the genuine perils they represent somehow just don't cut it. American directors just can't seem to resist throwing in Nazis, terrorists, revenge and the odd yeti to liven things up, as if hypothermia, vertigo and frostbite weren't enough.
All of which is no excuse for Vertical Limit. The latest in a long and largely unremarkable lineage of American mountain movies, Vertical Limit, directed by Mask of Zorro's Martin Campbell, leaps so far into the blue-sky of Hollywood hokum it makes 102 Dalmatians look like Hoop Dreams.
The movie is set on the spectacular slopes and shoulders of Pakistan's infamous K-2, at more than 28,000 feet, the second tallest mountain in the world. K-2, which was called Mount Godwin-Austin until it got tired of all the other Himalayas laughing behind it's back, also enjoys a reputation for meanness — many real-life mountain climbers have met their match and their maker, trying to reach its sheer summit. This, however, is not their story.
Chris O'Donnell, who was actually less plastic playing the rubberized Robin in the last Batman flick, plays the tormented son of a famous mountaineer who has given up climbing for a career as a nature photographer for National Geographic. That's hard enough to believe — knowing as little as he does about what to do in front of a camera, it's hard to conceive of him knowing what to do behind one — but the movie really vaults into the void when the reluctant shutterbug sets off to save his plucky little sister (Robin Tunney, who spends most of the movie slipping into unconsciousness and looking wan and ruddy), trapped by an avalanche, while helping an arrogant billionaire (Bill Paxton) try to climb K-2. Stuck in a chilly chasm almost as big as some of the holes in the plot without so much as a goalie to snack on, the stranded climbers have only six, 72, eight or 16 hours to live, depending on which of the film's fuzzy maths you wanna believe.
O'Donnell's hamster-headed rescue plan boldly disregards all the rules of mountaineering, logic, physiology, chemistry and physics. He manages to talk a handful of climbers into going up after the strandees, carrying powerful backpack bombs (!!!) lent to them by a sympathetic Pakistani military commander.
Unfortunately, the generous general doesn't bother to explain to them that the explosives will detonate if dropped, bumped, exposed to heat, light, strident soundtrack music or just whenever the action starts to lag — which in this picture is approximately every six minutes.
Now, I am willing to cut a well-meaning mainstreamer all sorts of slack when it comes to verisimilitude. And it would be easier to overlook the impossible feats of high-altitude strength and endurance (an oxygen mask would cover that winsome O'Donnell smile); the now you see it, now you don't breath of characters supposedly exerting themselves in sub-zero temperatures; and the way our hero keeps changing motivations if Vertical Limit weren't so, well, bad. Bad as in bad everything. The directing is inept, the acting incompetent (or in the case of Glenn and Paxton, uninspired), and the less said of the script, which sounds like it was written in the death-zone while the scribe's brain was running out of oxygen, the better. To make matters worse, the film is totally ignorant of how dorky it is, making unendurable scenes that might have been bitterly fun in a campy kind of way.
The only things in Vertical Limit that don't suck are the cutting and stunt work, which manage to throw a few more or less gratuitous visceral thrills the way of the viewer, especially if she or he is afraid of heights; and David Tattersall's location cinematography in the Himalayas and New Zealand (Pakistan's less lethal geological stand-in for most of the movie), which, needless to say, provide stunning vistas. It really makes one wonder, when nature has provided such beauty, and when the actual efforts of the foolhardy and the fanatic have dished up such drama, why any filmmaker would waste so much of our time and their money gilding that particular lily — especially when it so demeans both the mountains and the men and women who challenge them.