The Mountain Between Us (2017)
Stranded after a tragic plane crash, two strangers
must forge a connection to survive the extreme elements of a remote snow
covered mountain. When they realize help is not coming, they embark on a
perilous journey across the wilderness.
Director:
Hany Abu-Assad
Stranded after a tragic plane crash, two strangers must forge a
connection to survive the extreme elements of a remote snow covered
mountain. When they realize help is not coming, they embark on a
perilous journey across hundreds of miles of wilderness, pushing one
another to endure and discovering strength they never knew possible.
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
6 October 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Más allá de la montaña See more »Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Color:
ColorAspect Ratio:
2.35 : 1
She once survived a sinking ship in "Titanic." He once thrived on the mean streets of Baltimore on “The Wire.” Kate Winslet and Idris Elba
should by all rights have enough dramatic weight between them to easily
elevate a two-hander about strangers who must rescue themselves from a
desolate snow-blanketed Utah mountain range after their charter plane
crashes.
Instead, “The Mountain Between Us” is a high-altitude
soap opera, woozy with overly telegraphed peril and determined to make
the audience root for a couple who clearly aren’t meant for each other
and played by actors who deserve a generous C-minus in chemistry. In the
film’s production notes, Elba—considered dreamboat material by his many
fans—notes that this is his first-ever romantic lead. His surprising
awkwardness during the film’s intimate moments perhaps explains why.
What really comes between Winslet’s globetrotting photojournalist
Alex and Elba’s brain surgeon Ben as fate and bad weather bring them
together isn’t so much geographical but script-related. Based on a novel
by Charles Martin, the screenplay is a collaboration between Chris Weitz (“About a Boy,” the live-action “Cinderella”) and J. Mills Goodloe (“The Age of Adaline,” “Everything, Everything”). I’ll vouch for Weitz’s skills, but in the case of Goodloe, anyone who has adapted a Nicholas Sparks’ novel that isn’t “The Notebook” is suspect. And having seen “The Best of Me,” I rest my case.
Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, the maker of two politically charged Oscar-nominated foreign films (“Paradise Now” and “Omar,” the last featuring a love story) certainly has cred. But he fails to achieve producer Peter Chernin’s self-proclaimed vision of a romantic epic in the tradition of “Dr. Zhivago” and “Out of Africa.” Compared to those classics, “Mountain” is more of a molehill.
Right
out of the gate, I had an uneasy feeling about “The Mountain Between
Us” as all flights are canceled at an Idaho airport because of an
incoming blizzard. Alex, desperate to head back to New York in time for
her wedding, overhears Ben complaining that he has to operate on a young
boy the next morning. She proposes they share a small plane for hire.
Their pilot is Beau Bridges,
who emits good ol’ boy vibes as he brings his soulful-eyed golden
Labrador on-board. That his Walter doesn’t bother to file a flight plan
is an all-too-convenient warning sign.
Not long after takeoff,
while flying over remote treacherous terrain packed with white stuff,
Walter begins to slur his speech and Ben recognizes he is having a
stroke. Thank goodness, I have never witnessed anyone having such an
attack. But Bridges, perhaps making up for the brevity of his part,
seems to have taken his cues from Ian Holm’s Ash, the malfunctioning android in “Alien.” The crash itself isn’t all that terrifying in these days of “Flight” and “Sully.”
But Walter is a goner, the dog survives and he is in better shape than
Alex, who has a huge gash on her leg. Ben—oh, thank goodness, there just
happens to be a doctor in the house—fixes her up as best he can before
tending to his own cuts and bruises.
The medical stuff is the easy part. Cooperating with someone you
just met is a bit tougher. Once Alex wakes, she reveals herself to be
someone prone to taking risks and usually trusts her instincts in tight
situations. With no cell phone reception and with all devices that could
have alerted the occasional jet overhead unfortunately out of
commission, she thinks they should abandon ship and take their chances
on foot. The more conservative Ben, meanwhile, is less inclined to leave
what’s left of the aircraft and would rather stay put. As she heals,
the pair has a get-to-know-you period. Oddly, Ben wears a wedding ring
but does not mention his wife. Alex, meanwhile, knows that if she had
made it to her nuptials, she would have “rushed down the aisle like Dustin Hoffman
in ‘The Graduate.’” Ben waits a beat and echoes the thoughts of many a
cinephile in the theater by observing that Hoffman was trying to stop
the wedding. For emphasis, he meekly utters, “Elaine!”
That is
meet-cute stuff right there but the early portion of “The Mountain
Between Us” suggests a variation on “When Harry Met Sally…” Namely, can a
man and a woman become companions and work together for a common cause?
(That cause here being survival.) I liked that there seemed to be no
lovey-dovey business at this point. But then Alex looks through her
camera lens and sees a metallic glint off in the distance. Off they go
with their makeshift emotional therapy dog in tow and the days-long trek
forces them to cuddle against the cold at night. And, all too soon, the
movie takes a tumble from which it never recovers.
I should
have known when Ben early on portentously utters, “A heart is nothing
but a muscle” that this movie, just like the plane, was destined to
crash. Not to spoil the ending, which is corny as a crate of Cracker
Jack, but It seemed almost inevitable that Alex’s perfectly nice yet
bland fiancé would be Dermot Mulroney. For him, such roles are like Morgan Freeman playing the president or God. Meanwhile, weep not for our stars. Winslet’s career overcame the laborious “Labor Day” and Elba isn’t going to let the deadly “The Dark Tower”
get him down. Besides, once you realize that “The Mountain Between Us”
almost falls into the so-bad-it’s-good category, it just might become
destined for riff-worthy cultdom.
FINAL RATING: 6/10 for the genre and 6/10 overall. I expected a bit more but the movie losses in the main part my attention because of the plot.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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