CLIFFHANGER
A film review by Phineas Narco
Copyright 1993 Phineas Narco
CLIFFHANGER is the new "comeback" film for Sylvester Stallone, a high-altitude adventure taking place mostly on snowy (Rocky?) mountain peaks (actually shot in the Italian Alps). Stallone stars in the film and also did massive re-writes of the script.
The opening sequence is promising enough--Stallone tries to rescue Michael Rooker's character's girlfriend dangling precariously from a rope thousands of feet above a rocky canyon floor. Well, things do not turn out well, and the movie jumps eight months ahead to show Stallone coming back home to the mountains to reconcile himself with his group of friends who shared in the harrowing experience.
At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars in cash are being readied for air transport by the U.S. Treasury. The cash is being transported by plane to avoid the hazards of the cashload being robbed on route. But John Lithgow, the obligatory gun-toting psychopathic bad guy has other ideas. However something goes terribly wrong and the three bulky suitcases of thousand-dollar bills fall from the plane and are lost somewhere in the mountains (a new Samsonite commercial?). The hijacking sequence includes some great mid-air plane-to-plane stunts and the resultant plane crash is the best since ALIVE. Stranded in the mountains, Lithgow and crew call for help and Stallone and Rooker come climbing to the rescue.
The rest of the movie basically consists of the group's efforts to recover the lost money while Rooker, Stallone and friends thwart them at every turn. There's lots of action, explosions, gun battles, fistfights, more explosions, avalanches, and people hanging by their fingertips above yawning chasms.
The problem is: who cares? So much time is spent on action, pyrotechnics and dizzying camera angles and so little time and effort is spent on even the most perfunctory character development that we just don't care what happens to these people. What's the point of putting someone in a precarious, ostensibly suspenseful situation when that person is obviously just an actor playing a character as flat as the cliff face they're hanging from? The characters in this movie are just not believable, one-dimensional, sketchily drawn at best, and unworthy of our concern.
Stallone is ... well, Stallone. He may suffer now from the same fate of Madonna, i.e. he's become a caricature of himself, he is upstaged by his own 'real life' persona ... the guy has never had much of a range anyway ... it's hard to see him as someone other than Stallone. Every Stallone movie has to have that moment of 'idiot rage' where his mouth twists itself into that familiar shape, his eyes scrunch up and he screams something like "Adddriiiiiiiaaaaaaannn!!!!" or "Nooooooooo!!!" Every Stallone movie has to have at least two scenes in which the hero gets the living bejesus beaten out of him only to come back at the last possible instant and decimate his attacker. The feeling it gave me was that the movie had some nice stunts, camera work and scenery, but otherwise I've seen it all before. Like BATMAN RETURNS (with which this movie has a lot in common in that it's very big on look and style and very short on substance), the mark of a bad film is when the hero does or says something clever or heroic in a scene--calculated, obviously, to make the audience cheer (there's usually a lapse in the dialogue at this point so the audience doesn't miss any one-liners while they hoot and holler)--but instead, the audience just sits there and says, "Yeah? So?" Or worse, laughs. And there were sequences in the film that were like that.
Rooker by far gives the best performance of the lot, though it's sad to see an actor of his caliber wasted in something like this.
Lithgow, again, is simply not believable, not that he's a bad actor (I thought he did a pretty good job as the villains in BLOW OUT and RICOCHET) it's just the character is again ... cliche. His fake English accent is the worst since Keanu Reave's in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA.
Technically, it's not bad ... in fact, there are some stunning visuals. However there's a long pull out shot of Stallone on a cliff-face where you can just see the matte line. Some of the rear projection stuff looks to be not quite suited light-wise to the foreground, and the 'underneath the ice' sequence is obviously done in a studio.
It's too bad, some good characters, some good writing, and this could have been a tremendous film. I heard on USENET that this picture cost $140 million to make which, I believe, if true, would make it the most expensive movie of all time. There's a scene in the picture where Stallone and friend cuddle next to a fire of burning thousand-dollar bills. For me, that scene captured the essence of this picture.
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