Film
Cliffhanger
- Director
- Renny Harlin
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 113 mins
In Renny Harlin‘s palm-moistening 1993 action flick, Sly Stallone plays an erstwhile Rocky Mountain rescuer who packed it all in – including feisty lurrve interest Janine Turner – when a failed rescue attempt resulted in the death of an inexperienced climber. One year on, he’s back trying to persuade Ms. Turner to join him in a less vertigo-inducing environment when a bunch of heavily armed bad guys led by John Lithgow literally drop from the skies in a virtual re-run of the crash scene from Alive, scattering pilfered cases filled with a total of a hundred million dollars across the snowswept peaks, and kidnap everyone in sight apart from our angst-ridden hero. But can unarmed Sly rescue his pals, pick off the baddies one-by-one, crash the odd helicopter, redeem himself, and find an opportunity to remove his T-shirt before the closing credits?
Although most attention focused on the hugely expensive mid-air stunt in which a villain slides along a cable between two fast-moving jet aircraft, Harlin puts the most terrifying moment right upfront in a hugely overwrought rescue-gone-wrong sequence that wrings every last drop of sweat from the audience’s palms. After that, it’s Die Hard on a Mountain with John Lithgow (an American, lest we forget) playing the traditional icy, wise-cracking British baddie and good ol’ Daddy Walton (Ralph Waite) reviving his career as the suitably patriarchal rescue team leader. There’s more rope in the plot than is used to lash Sly to the rocks, incidental characters being introduced merely to drive it clumsily along. But no one ever went to a Sly Stallone movie for narrative sophistication or deep insights into the human condition, and this is one you really have to see on the big screen to get the full impact of all those explosions and larking about at dizzying heights.
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