This review is a part of my Bill Paxton Project, an attempt to watch and review every piece of film the man did during his lifetime.
Cold open to this film: a family (brother, sister and daddy) are rock climbing in the desert. Something bad happens, and son has to cut daddy loose to fall to his death so that son and daughter can live. Damn. This is how Vertical Limit (2000) begins.
This shit would’ve left me permanently scarred, and I don’t think I’d have ever gone near a mountain again. Yet, a short dissolve finds both of them three years later at the base of K2 in Pakistan. No fucking way.
Chris O’Donnell headlines this pic as Peter Garrett, with Robin Tunney playing his sister Annie. Bill Paxton (yes, folks, he is the reason we’re here) plays billionaire Elliot Vaughn, who wants to summit the mountain as his new airplane flies over the top. Think shades of Elon Musk (don’t forget, that dude shot a sports car into space). As they summit, a storm triggers an avalanche and traps Annie and Elliot in a crevasse, along with a badly wounded Tom (played by “X-Files” alum Nicholas Lea). Of course, Peter mounts a rescue with the help of the Pakistani army, who give him lots of unstable nitro glycerin to put in his backpack. Peter assembles a team consisting of weird mountain guru Montgomery Wick (Scott Glenn), Kareem Nazir (played by “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” actor Alexander Siddig), two crazy Australians and a French-Canadian chick. “Boba Fett” actor Temuera Morrison also has a small role as a helicopter pilot and the inventor of the shoe bomb. Makes me wonder if this movie inspired Richard Reid.
On the way up, the nitro becomes unstable (there’s a shock no one saw coming!) and blows up Nazir and both Australians. We find out Paxton’s character Elliot is a dick, who left the team (including Wick’s wife) to die the last time he was stranded on the mountain. As if we’d expect anything else from an Elon Musk type character. Elliot then murders Tom to preserve rations, while Wick explains that they are above the “vertical limit” of 24,000 feet, where death is an inevitability. Thanks, movie, for explaining the title! See, Red Wing and Monolith, is it really such a big ask?
Yadda yadda yadda, Peter saves his sister, and Wick and Elliot die in a twist that was foreshadowed waaaay back at the beginning of the film. Overall, the film had some decent one-liners, some okay character moments. But, overall, the characters are one-dimensional and poorly developed, and the plot is absolutely absurd. If you want a great mountain movie, skip this and rent “Ski School” instead.
