Vertical Limit

An effort to rescue three stranded mountain climbers (Robin Tunney, Bill Paxton and an expendable extra) is led by Tunney’s brother (Chris O’Donnell), who killed their father to save their own lives on a climb three years earlier—just the kind of guy I’d want on a mountainside with me. Written (if that isn’t too dignified a word for this smelly morass of clichés and insipid dialogue) by Robert King and Terry Hayes and indifferently directed by Martin Campbell, the film is something of an agricultural experiment: an attempt to see if corn will grow at 26,000 feet. It grows, all right, but feebly and without nourishment. There are all the outlandish stunts computers can generate, but the cliffhanger contrivances are so ridiculous, and the derring-do so transparently bogus, that real suspense is absent.