Extras: 2 Featurettes: Surviving the Limit & National Geographic Channel's
Quest for K2, 7 Mini Featurettes (Search and Rescue Tales), Filmographies,
Trailers, Audio Commentary
Director:
Martin Campbell
(Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro, No Escape, Vertical Limit)
Producers:
Martin Campbell, Marcia Nasatir, Lloyd Philips and Robert King
Screenplay:
Robert King and Terry Hayes
Music:
James Newton Howard
Cast:
Peter Garrett: Chris O'Donnell
Annie Garrett: Robin Tunney
Elliot Vaughn: Bill Paxton
Monique Aubertine: Izabella Scorupco
Montgomery Wick: Scott Glenn
Tom McLaren: Nicholas Lea
Kareem Nazir: Alexander Siddiq
Skip Taylor: Robert Taylor
Major Rasul: Temeura Morrison
Royce Garret: Stuart Wilson
Complete and utter nonsense is what you get with Vertical Limit.
But that will either appeal or it won't.
The film begins with the family Garrett - son Peter (Chris O'Donnell),
daughter Annie (Robin Tunney) and father Royce (Stuart Wilson) -
up on a routine mountain climb, but those two above them cock it up and come
crashing down almost taking these three with them. However, three potential
survivors are cut down to two as the father realises that one hook in the
rock won't hold all three and begs his son to cut him loose so at least his
children survive.
That's mistake number one, because I hate films where one character appears
to selflessly give up their own life just because they think they won't make
it if the alternative happened, or without giving full thought to working on
a solution.
Fast forward three years later and billionaire businessman Elliot Vaughn (Bill
Paxton) is on a PR campaign to climb K2 with a team that includes
Skip Taylor (Robert Taylor), Tom McLaren (Nicholas Lea) and
Monique Aubertine (Goldeneye's Izabella Scorupco). Of course,
things are about to go disastrously wrong but Vaughn would rather save face
than face up to the reality of danger.
Where the Garretts fit into all this is because brother and sister haven't
spoken to each other much since the incident. Peter has become a mountaineering
know-it-all and Annie works for a TV station who are filming the ascent.
Naturally, Peter wants to save his sister from the fate she can't see at first.
And there's mistake number two - a family matter in amongst an incredibly
dull plot.
Now throw in a stupid old man in the "Cracker" role, i.e. with Scott Glenn
playing the beardy weirdy Montgomery Wick, you know that everything he says
about the situation they're in and which everyone else is ignoring, will turn
out to be 100% correct.
There are some nice looking, but painfully obvious, special FX shots along the
way, but you'll find yourself skipping through the flick to get to them, because
the trite dialogue (mistake number three) won't keep you engaged.
Whoops, butterfingers!
The picture is very good with artifacts only occasionally visible on the
1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen picture. When the picture is sharp, it's pin-sharp.
A good example is the opening scene, but it only serves to highlight that
they're not really climbing a rock.
The average bitrate is 5.10Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 8Mb/s.
Dolby Digital 5.1 is here in English and Hungarian and hits home when there's
a problem on the mountain, but at other times it's incredibly quiet.
First up in the extras are two main featurettes: Surviving the Limit,
a 24-minute bog-standard look at the making of the film with cast and crew
chat and non-anamorphic film clips; and National Geographic Channel's
Quest for K2, a 13-minute programme by said TV channel with a few people
in the know commenting on the problems people have had climbing the mountain.
7 Mini Featurettes are included under the heading of Search and Rescue Tales,
each of which last a few minutes in length and look at avalanches, trekking
to K2 and "The Death Zone". Filmographies for main cast and crew members
are here along with Trailers for this film (in 1.85:1 anamorphic),
All the Pretty Horses (4:3 fullscreen - the film stars Matt Damon
and Penelope Cruz) and
The Mask of Zorro
(2.35:1 non-anamorphic). Finally, comes an Audio Commentary track
from director Campbell and producer Lloyd Philips.
The disc contains the usual 28 chapters, plus subtitles in 17 languages:
English, Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic,
Hindi, Hebrew, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Greek and
Arabic. Dutch subtitles are also provided for the audio commentary, but why aren't
they in English too?
The menus have some animation and are scored, but it's nothing to get too
excited about.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
