Vertical Limit

Herald rating: * * *

Cast: Chris O'Donnell, Bill Paxton, Robin Tunney, Scott Glenn

Director: Martin Campbell

Running time: 124 minutes

Rating: M (violence, offensive language)
Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas from Thursday

Review: Russell Baillie

They may be our mountains but it's just another mountain movie. Vertical Limit does a good job of making the Southern Alps look like the Himalayas but that's its last illusion.

There's not much to believe in its story or characters as it does its darnedest to construct a whiteout action thriller on the sides of K2, the peak that's shorter than Everest but oh so much gnarlier, dude.

It delivers stunts aplenty. Ones which inspire admiration for those game enough to physically tackle the odds in an increasingly digitally enhanced action-flick world.

Yes, those leaps, avalanches, explosions, (don't ask how they got explosions into a mountaineering movie but they did), various sequences involving hanging by a thread, ice axe or crampon sure are something. And it does try to say something about the Himalayas being turned into an extreme-sport Club Med for the rich and famous.

But otherwise, Vertical Limit forgets that the stuff that really makes these sorts of films - or any really - lies underneath the Gore-tex. It tries to make us believe in the people involved. It even works in some family values, with its story of Peter Garrett (O'Donnell) trying to rescue his fellow mountain-goat sister (Tunney) when she comes a cropper in her attempt to guide a Richard Branson-like squillionaire (Paxton) to the top of K2.

But, along the way, it becomes a collection of vertigo photo-ops or lessons on Really High Mountaineering.

Its prelude, set on the sort of Utah rockface last seen in Mission Impossible: 2 is a riveting attention-getter. But after that it's all downhill, in an uphill kind of way.

It manages some quirks in the supporting turns, whether it's Glenn's zen mountain man, the stoic stoner Aussie climbing brothers (Steve Le Marquand and Ben Mendelsohn) or Temuera Morrison's Pakistani military chopper pilot, all of whom form part of the rescue mission.

Otherwise, even high-altitude oxygen depletion can't excuse dialogue ropy enough for abseiling. And O'Donnell's efforts at being the guy just trying to do the right thing comes off nearly as cold as the environs we find him in.

It's not one of the great mountain-peril flicks, this one. The main problem is that it keeps piling on the stuntfests while we're still trying to figure out if the characters are worth following to those great heights.

It certainly looks high, cold, exhausting and risky. But the thought still occurs - before we give 'em permission to use our natural alpine wonders, shouldn't we ask if they have a decent script?