Review: Vertical Limit (2000)

 Vertical Limit (2000)

Rated PG-13 for intense life/death situations and brief strong language

Score: 3 out of 5

Vertical Limit is a movie from what my generation thinks of as the “good old days” of movies. A mid-high-budget “programmer” with a cast populated by both recognizable B-listers like Bill Paxton and Scott Glenn and (at the time) up-and-comers like Chris O’Donnell, Robin Tunney, and Izabella Scorupco, built around a high-concept, high-octane plot that wasn’t based on sci-fi or fantasy but on a very real, very extreme activity, in this case mountain and rock climbing. It approaches its subject matter with about as much realism as you might expect from Hollywood, focused more on the cool parts and the ways in which things can go wrong than on the nitty-gritty; at least one professional rock climber criticized the opening scene for its inaccuracy, though the person I was watching it with, who has gone rock climbing once or twice herself, cited the same scene as a good example of what might happen if you don’t follow safety procedures. Me, I didn’t really care either way. I got a rather intense, very late ‘90s/early '00s thrill ride that aims to deliver a simple survival story without a lot of fat, and mostly pulls it off, even if it can dip into cheese at points.

Three years ago, our protagonists, siblings Peter and Annie Garrett, lost their father in a rock climbing accident in Monument Valley. Now, Annie, initially an unskilled amateur, has become a professional photographer who improved her climbing skills dramatically as a way of honoring her father, while Peter has retired from climbing. One day, Elliot Vaughn, a douchey media mogul who’s totally not based on Richard Branson (kids, swap out Branson’s name for Elon Musk’s, and you have a good idea of the personality we’re dealing with), decides to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain and arguably its most perilous, as part of a publicity stunt for his airline, and recruits Annie as part of his team for the ascent; Peter shows up at base camp mainly to wish his sister well. Of course, things go horribly wrong, leaving Annie, Vaughn, and a third climber as the only survivors trapped in a crevasse tens of thousands of feet above sea level. With his sister’s life on the line, Peter leads a climbing team of his own to rescue Annie from the clutches of K2. Joining him is veteran climber Montgomery Wick, whose wife died leading Vaughn on a previous ascent of K2, and who sees Vaughn as an idiot or worse.

The thing everybody who watches this movie is here for is the mountain itself, and if nothing else, it delivers on that front. You get a whole lot of scenes of attractive Hollywood actors climbing a mountain that, while clearly not filmed on the actual K2, still feels as perilous as the real thing. Anything that can go wrong probably does go wrong, as lack of oxygen, volatile nitroglycerine, avalanches, and shortages of vital medicine all threaten the protagonists, often to spectacular effect. A lot of it looked and felt like practical effects, or at least really good CGI that the $75 million budget clearly went to good use for, yet it still felt just restrained enough that it didn’t overwhelm the senses. As a pure survival thriller, this movie works.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the human drama. The opening where Peter and Annie's dad dies, particularly when his corpse came loudly thudding to the ground after a few seconds of near-silence, was unintentionally hilarious, and it set the tone for the film’s later attempts to get me to care about its characters. Robin Tunney especially is an actor whose ‘90s “it girl” work I’ve never thought highly of even in her better films like The Craft, and here, she has the misfortune of spending most of the movie next to Bill Paxton, who easily outshines her as Vaughn, the utter scumbag CEO responsible for the mess and the closest thing this film has to a human villain. Chris O’Donnell, meanwhile, is saddled with a tacked-on romantic subplot involving Izabella Scorupco as a French-Canadian female climber on his rescue crew, and like Tunney, is otherwise outshined by Scott Glenn as Wick, the grizzled old mountaineer who has personal history with K2 and was easily my favorite character in the film. The rest of the characters were as obviously cannon fodder as the victims of a slasher movie, which actually worked on a primal level, as I found myself eagerly anticipating what the mountain was gonna throw at them next once it became clear that they did not have the plot armor that O’Donnell and Tunney had.

The Bottom Line

It’s kinda basic and runs a bit too long, but Vertical Limit still delivers the goods that you’d expect from a thriller about mountain climbing, no more and no less.