CLIFFHANGER
A review by Steve Baumgarten
(sbb@panix.com)
Although a two-word review would be nearly sufficient for this one ("Climb Hard"), it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to write, and it would be a tad misleading. I should say at the outset that if nothing else, CLIFFHANGER proves how difficult it is to make a top-notch action film, no matter how much money or how many digital effects you throw at it. It also shows quite convincingly why Arnold Schwarzenegger is the biggest box office draw of his generation, while Sylvester Stallone is quickly becoming an embarrassing curiosity, someone who apparently cannot be convinced to settle for his decade worth of fame and fortune and fade gracefully into the background. (In fact, Stallone's performance in CLIFFHANGER does more than that: it really forces us to think about which other action/adventure star has done so much to ruin a film so promising. None come to mind, though perhaps as I get further into this review I'll suffer a DOUBLE IMPACT / UNIVERSAL SOLDIER flashback and decide upon Jean-Claude Van Damme. Though at least Van Damme is still cheap.)
Stallone is not cheap; in fact, nothing about CLIFFHANGER is cheap. Unfortunately, nothing about CLIFFHANGER is all that good, either; as a virtual clone of DIE HARD, it hardly merits a mention in the same paragraph, though on the surface it's not immediately clear why. After all, CLIFFHANGER is chock full of nasty, sneering European terrorists; high-tech explosions; graphic violence; hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be accessed only through the use of a computer code; and a bare-chested, steroidal hero who wreaks havoc on the terrorists and single-handedly saves the day. Even the altitude of the two films is nearly the same; although come to think of it, Bruce Willis never seemed to be suffering from oxygen deprivation -- and yet oxygen deprivation is the only thing that could reasonably explain Stallone's unrelievedly awful dialogue.
Yes, Stallone wrote the screenplay (or should I say, "rewrote" it, since however execrable it seems in its current form, it was apparently even worse before Sly "improved" it). And CLIFFHANGER's terrible screenplay is its Achilles heel, for although director Renny Harlin (who did a respectable job in the similarly implausible DIE HARD 2) does what he can to keep our minds off of Stallone's dialogue, inevitably the film slows down and we find ourselves stuck on a ledge with nothing between us and a perilous fall into unintentional hilarity but the thin rope of Stallone's wit. Rope? Better make that thread...
There are also other, more subtle problems with the film. One that looms particularly large is the sheer unoriginality of the screenplay -- as I mentioned, the writer(s) seemed to want to remake DIE HARD on a mountain instead of inside a skyscraper. That they did, though in doing so they missed many of the elements that made DIE HARD so successful (putting aside clever dialogue and a hero who didn't make the audience cringe every time he appeared on the screen). Primarily, they missed DIE HARD's single-minded, pared-down focus. We never got a lot of background or human interest stories in DIE HARD; in fact, one of its best qualities is that it went from civilized Christmas party to Bruce Willis running bare-foot through broken glass in an astonishingly short amount of time. Yes, much of DIE HARD was silly; much was entirely implausible; much was downright maudlin. But because its pacing was so superb, the filmmakers were able to trick us into overlooking all its flaws and instead see only the film's central vision. At heart, DIE HARD was little more than a high-tech spaghetti Western, with Bruce Willis as -- quite literally for most of the film -- The Man With No Name, who against unbelievable odds must save the town and the woman he loves from death and destruction at the hands of sinister bad guys.
But I defy anyone who has seen CLIFFHANGER to tell me what this film's vision is. Actually, I'll settle for a conference call with Harlin, Stallone, and anyone at all at Carolco willing to admit to paying Stallone what amounts to $2 million for each of his unbroken string of duds since RAMBO to star in, rewrite, and ruin this one.
CLIFFHANGER is, in fact, three films, two of which star Mr. Stallone and only one of which is particularly interesting. The first film provides background for Stallone's character, Gabe Walker, who loses his confidence as a rescue ranger when he lets an inexperienced climber slip from his grasp and plunge to her digitally enhanced doom. That Walker could have done little to save her and that in fact he did nothing at all to put her life in jeopardy is treated by the screenplay as one of those small, unimportant details that only sticklers for plausible motivation will care about. Since the filmmakers assume that their audience will be comprised, for the most part, of unthinking dolts, it hardly matters what happens in the scene, as long as Stallone gives himself a reason to look disheartened and forlorn for the next half hour. (Not to give anything away, but in a surprise twist Stallone ceases looking disheartened and forlorn when he learns that his best friend is in trouble -- rendering the whole of the film's first sub-plot entirely pointless.)
After its breathtaking opening sequence, the film crashes back to earth for what seems like an eternity as the second of the three sub-plots is laboriously set up. Here we are introduced to us the terrorists, lead by John Lithgow in predictably over-the-top, sociopathic style, and their own plot to hijack a Treasury plane transporting three suitcases filled with thousand-dollar bills. I won't go into the details of their plan here, as its execution is surely the high point of the film and provides CLIFFHANGER with a much needed -- though meager -- dose of originality. It also keeps Stallone and his inability to act off the screen for 20 minutes or so, which certainly doesn't hurt -- though it does make us wonder whether CLIFFHANGER could have been further improved by eliminating Stallone's character entirely and allowing Michael Rooker to share in the heroics with Janine Turner. Both are accomplished actors, and both are just as qualified as Stallone to allow stunt doubles and digital compositing to handle the action part of this action-adventure film. As for running around in snow-covered fields waving automatic weapons, well, anyone can do that. The real question is whether CLIFFHANGER would have been as much of a draw without Stallone; I'd argue that it might have been even more of one without his ham-handed presence both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.
As long as the hijacking is in progress, the film seems fresh, fun, and original. But once the terrorists crash-land and begin trying to find the suitcases, things take a decided turn for the worst. This happens in two ways: first, although there is a surfeit of running around, shooting and hiding, there seems a remarkable paucity of mountain climbing. Perhaps this is because Stallone looks nothing at all like a mountain climber (and in fact looks absolutely ridiculous as he pulls his way up the side of a cliff in one of the rare climbing scenes); perhaps it's because the filmmakers decided that mountain climbing -- being a slow and deliberate process that can't be quick-cut edited into random places in the film -- just wouldn't be exciting enough for their supposedly jaded audience. If so, they made a terrible mistake. One need only sit with an audience watching the IMAX film TO THE LIMIT to realize the profound effect real mountain climbing can have on people who rarely take the stairs at their places of work, let alone set out to scale the side of a cliff. Certainly we've all seen people shooting at each other with automatic weapons; given the choice between a clever (but relatively bloodless) cat-and-mouse chase up and across perilous cliffs, and the usual mindless Hollywood violence, I suspect people would much rather pay to see the former.
What we get, however, is the latter. The "running around and shooting" portion of the film is CLIFFHANGER's third sub-plot, and it is without a doubt the weakest, if only because it is the least original and most mean-spirited of the three. I mentioned above that once the terrorists crash-land, things take a turn for the worst in two ways, and as this third sub-plot unfolds, we quickly discover that as lively and as fresh the first half of the film seemed, the second becomes just as mean-spirited and vicious. I thought this incredibly unfortunate, partly because I'd believed we'd left such inane violence and cruelty behind us in the films of the late eighties, and partly because it seems so much at odds with the film's beautiful natural surroundings. It's one thing for Bruce Willis to pump dozens of rounds of automatic weapon fire into a terrorist in a high-tech office building in 1988; it's another thing to watch this same scene unfold beneath delicately snow-capped trees and in front of breath-taking natural vistas. Nature is not without its own kind of violence and cruelty, but Wild Kingdom this is not.
This third sub-plot is also greatly weakened by some of the sloppiest editing I've seen this year. To be honest, much of the last half-hour of the film simply doesn't make sense -- it seemed to me that CLIFFHANGER had been hacked down to its 118-minute running time from an original film of much greater length, and given that the screenplay (at any length) was never a paragon of logic, this editing rendered the end of the film nearly incomprehensible. Too many scenes simply exist in a vacuum -- we often have no feeling for how Stallone or the terrorists got from one cliff to another, or where any individual location is in relation to any other. The film does feature one character who walks around with an electronic suitcase-finder; too bad he doesn't also have a continuity-finder, for at times we feel about as lost and abandoned as those suitcases.
This lack of continuity reaches its nadir when Stallone attempts to follow the terrorists across a foot bridge between two cliffs. The scene is featured prominently in the film's advertising, and those of us who saw the ads expect Stallone to make it most of the way, trigger an explosion, and then leap to safety at the last moment. At least we expect a stunt double to do this. Or $5 million worth of T2-style computer animation. Something, anyway. But in fact what happens is that Stallone jumps *back* to the cliff whence he came. While this may seem marginally more plausible, it does pose a small problem: sans a telephone booth nearby (into which Stallone might run to don his Superman outfit so as to fly across the chasm), it's not clear how the pursuit of the terrorists will continue.
But continue it does, of course, logic be damned. That kind of contempt for an audience's intelligence really bothers me, since it's so unnecessary. It's one thing to ask us to believe that Treasury planes fly around with suitcases full of thousand-dollar bills; perhaps they do. But how can we be expected to buy a chase scene set in the mountains that -- somehow -- never involves any mountain-climbing? Putting people on a ledge is inherently dramatic; having them run around shooting each other (or worse, beating each other up in ways that make the ROCKY films look tame in comparison) is not.
That said, it's clear that much of the action is diverting and generally entertaining, especially if you can turn your brain off after buying your popcorn and soda. (My feeling is that something like this happened as soon as Stallone rolled blank paper into his typewriter.) The scenery upstages everything, even Stallone's lovingly photographed and scantily clad body. The special effects are usually very good, but often they don't look particularly convincing, perhaps because the two-dimensional characters, awful dialogue, and incoherent plot keep us from fully suspending disbelief. Or perhaps because they're just not consistently good (as the special effects in T2 were). Scenes that were shot indoors look like they were shot indoors, especially one in which Stallone chases the film's plausibility out on to thin ice. (Hint: only he survives.) The situation might have been helped had Stallone himself ever gone near a step ladder, let alone a mountain; less optical printing and more actual rock climbing might have left more money for better special effects used less frequently. As it is, all of the scenes set on cliffs -- and that were actually filmed outdoors, rather than simulated on a sound stage -- utilize stunt doubles, and most are filmed from quite a distance. A nice close-up or two of Stallone actually on a cliff might have helped lend some authenticity to the proceedings. But as he's afraid of heights, that wasn't a possibility, so the burden of making a realistic-looking film was pushed off on to the many special effects houses involved with the production.
Rooker and Turner are largely wasted; in fact, it wasn't clear to me why their characters were written into the screenplay in the first place. Remember that John McClane's wife in DIE HARD served no purpose other than to be taken hostage; yet although Turner plays side-kick to Stallone throughout much of the film, she's allowed to do little more than dilute the film's focus. And when it comes to focus, CLIFFHANGER seems more than a little astigmatic -- the last thing Stallone needs are two other "good guys" getting caught up underfoot, doing little more than showcasing his inability to act.
CLIFFHANGER opened when it did for a reason: faced with competition from JURASSIC PARK and LAST ACTION HERO, Tri Star wisely opted for an otherwise action-adventure-free weekend, at least three weeks before the two biggest summer draws were scheduled to open. With competition coming only from a handful of light spring comedies, CLIFFHANGER is bound to do well at the box office. But come August, when people may well be seeing the best of this summer's blockbusters for a second and third time, I doubt if anyone but Carolco's bankruptcy attorneys will remember this strictly-by-the-numbers film.
: Steve Baumgarten : sbb@panix.com
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