Rescue operation on the upper slopes of K2, where three survivors of an aborted climb are sealed up in a bottomless crevasse. The clock is ticking -- thirty-six hours to painful death by pulmonary edema -- and a Wages of Fear ingredient is added to the rescuers' knapsacks in the form of three canisters of nitro: one false step and KA-BOOM. (Someone at base camp points out the folly of risking six lives to save three, and he is not sought out at tale's end when he could have said "I told you so.") The movie at least passes the fanny test: something that can be sat through without undue wear and tear on the upholstery and the ischium. The suspense mechanisms are well-oiled, and the setting and situation inspire director Martin Campbell to a higher-than-average level of compositional solidity, the better to record an angle of ascent or depth of abyss. Somehow, though, mountain-climbing exploits seem less impressive in the CG age (see, also, Cliffhanger) than in the primitive period of, say, The Eiger Sanction, when you could still believe that Clint Eastwood, sans stuntman, was actually on the precipice he appeared to be on. The seamlessness of today's computer-generated imagery is such as to cast doubt even on legitimate stuntwork: we can never believe our own eyes anymore. Too, this seamlessness encourages and facilitates a kind of cartoonization of the action, a distortion of physical possibilities to a degree that simply stirs up further doubt. (Why the hard sell? Why the hyperbole? What is there to hide?) It is food for thought, then, that the movie's single most exciting sequence is the one in which the studio fakery is most visually evident: the debarkation of the rescue team from an unsteady helicopter nuzzling up to a mountain crag. Chris O'Donnell, Robin Tunney, Scott Glenn, Bill Paxton, Temuera Morrison. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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