The girl with electroscope thighs (12/14/00)
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Vertical Limit. [Martin Campbell, 2000. Written by Robert King and Terry Hayes.]
The novelist John Gregory Dunne, who in collaboration with his wife Joan Didion has made a tidy living over the years as a screenwriter, tells the story of their first encounter with the New Breed of action directors: called in to doctor an ailing script for one such Kid Flash noted for his love of vivid moments of excitement [carcrashes, explosions, etc.], they asked for his input. — What about Act One? asked Dunne. — Act One, said the Kid, Needs more whammies. — Okay, said Dunne, What about Act Two then? — Act Two, said the Kid, Whammies mount up. — I see, said Dunne. And Act Three? — Act Three, said the Kid: All whammies.
The director in question [one learns elsewhere] was Renny Harlin; whose best work, of course, was the mountaineering thriller
Cliffhanger — from which, along with Jon Krakauer’s real-life account [
Into Thin Air] of the Everest disasters of 1996 and [referenced at a critical juncture] the recent discovery, after a seventy-year search, of the body of the Himalayan pioneer George Leigh-Mallory, the present narrative derives.
And sure enough, after a minimum of preliminary designed to estrange sibling climbers Chris O’Donnell and Robin Tunney and deposit them on K2 in the company of Evil Billionaire Bill Paxton and Old Man Of The Mountain Scott Glenn, it’s a continuous series of blizzards, avalanches, wild leaps into empty space, and headlong slides down nearvertical glaciers ending with everyone in the cast strung out like beads on a rope hanging over a yawning chasm wheezing horribly from the altitude staring terrified at the lurching helicopter whose blades are about to sever their tether while the Indians and the Pakistanis fire artillery rounds at one another overhead: all whammies. — Obviously nobody would ever have climbed K2, if it were really this difficult. But in movies like this one, reality is a crutch.
Incidentally, what must be regarded as the Worst Moment In Motion Pictures for the year 2000 appears in the first reel of this opus, when O’Donnell [posed, naturally, hanging from a rope on the face of a cliff] sings a song to Ms. Tunney; this would be a nightmare at best, but the song is
MacArthur Park, which makes it the ultimate horror. Where was that load of unstable nitro when we really needed it?
____________Thora, Thora, Thora (12/8/00)
