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Vertically A Review by |
| On Friday December 8th at 9:55 p.m., I was robbed of
ten dollars in a darkened AMC Theater. I know who my assailant was, and many of you know
him from some of his previous crimes such as "The Bachelor" or "Batman and
Robin". Well, that thief is at it once again…and this time he has found a way to
dupe us all into his web of pick pocketing. This man’s name is Chris O’Donnell
and his crime… "Vertical Limit". "Vertical Limit" starts out with Peter Garret, his father, sister, and a few other members of a mountain climbing team. Without telling anything, something tragic occurs and it changes the relationship between all the family members involved. Skip forward four years and Peter’s sister Annie (Robin Tunney from End of Days) finds herself embarking on a dangerous climb up K2…the world’s second highest peak. When things go awry, Peter’s sister gets trapped inside the frozen mountain, and has a few hours to survive before her air supply disappears. So its up to Peter, and a few locals to climb up the mountain and get his sister and the surviving team members to safety. You know that adrenaline pumping commercial you’ve seen in front of other movies or on TV, well all those action scenes you see there are all the ones that are in the movie. That’s it, nothing more or less. What you see is what you get, and to tie the far and between action scenes together there is tons and tons of either inaudible or pointless dialogue performed by a bunch of two cent actors. No one in this movie is believable in anything they try to get across, and since this film relies more on drama then it does action…that’s not a good thing. The plot here is traditional man against nature type of movie like Sylvester Stallone’s "Daylight"; the plot is non-existent and chock full of loop holes. Like why would a woman with a lung disease give 2-minute speeches and break out into song.baffling it is. Also, there are questionable tactics which leave you asking why would a group of trained mountain climbers take an unstable element such as NITRO up on the mountain, where they are constantly banging around and moving. Maybe it’s just me, but I was always taught that when a loud noise or explosion occurs around huge amounts of snow...expect bad things to happen. The screenwriter here ran out of ideas, and said, "Hey, let’s give them Nitro!! We can have so many cool explosions!" Bastards! Last, the things in this movie are overly cheesy. You can actually tell when the actors are in front of a green screen and when computer graphics are being used, and when they’re not. Now, if we were in 1980’s this wouldn’t be a bad thing. But here, in 2000…things are a lot easier to clean up nowadays. And since the studio OBVIOUSLY didn’t spend any money on the actors for this film, Columbia should have shelled out for some better special effects. There are some climactic scenes
in this film, but because you don’t care about one single person in this film...it
all fails. There are very few man vs. nature films that are actually good, and for some
strange reason. I honestly thought this was going to be one of them. But if you want to
see a truly good man vs. nature film, see "Perfect Storm"...it handles the drama
and action that is needed for a film like this flawlessly. So if you’ve been waiting
for this movie, I hate to break it to you. "Vertical Limit" stands a little
vertically challenged. |
-Now that you've read something, he's written. Wouldn't you like to find out more about Vigilante? Here you go. |
out of four.
