It is hard to believe that Brit director Martin Campbell made his name with the relentlessly po-faced Edge of Darkness, especially after being buffeted into oblivion by this monstrously entertaining B-movie. I mean to say, I know he's had a crack at James Bond and Zorro but there was no indication that he was capable of bullying an audience into submission with such alacrity as he does here.
Vertical Limit takes every mountain climbing action cliché in the book, combines it with the plot from Wages of Fear and dumps the whole lot on the screen in no particular order. We begin in Arizona in the Grand Canyon, where a brother, sister and dad climbing team have an accident which results in the death of father. "Three years later", runs the captioning (ah, the thrill of observing the dramatic unities!), sister Annie (Robin Tunney) is part of a team attempting to climb K2 - the world's second highest peak - while her brother Peter (Chris O'Donnell), traumatised by the events of three minutes, sorry, three years earlier, has become a wildlife photographer.
Before you know it, they're all up to their necks in snow and ice as the leading party fall down a crevasse in a storm and Peter must conquer his fears and rescue his sister with a hand-picked bunch of mountain misfits, including a pair of Australian brothers (for comic relief), a gorgeous French girl (for wow factor) and a wizened old expert and all-purpose mountain guru (a kind of mountaineering Yoda), Montgomery Wick (Scott Glenn) - a man so tough he shaves his beard without soap or water. Gosh.
The extra burden is to carry up the mountain containers of unstable nitroglycerine borrowed from the Pakistan army (don't ask) in order to blast their way through the ice to rescue the survivors, who are all about to die of pulmonary oedema. With me so far?
It's all completely mad, of course, and whenever there isn't enough shouting and screaming and explosions and avalanches Campbell simply brings on a helicopter to stir things up a bit and create more sound and fury. All of which signifies nothing more than a non-stop, high-decibel, in-your-face blitzkrieg of special snow 'n' ice effects, falling-off-mountains stunts and frozen stiff-upper-lip acting. Did I say a B movie? Make that B-plus.
Vertical Limit
Cert: cert12
