Cliffhanger (1993)
Sylvester Stallone plays a mountain ranger overcome with grief at the death of a colleague who is unwittingly drawn into a heist of a US Treasury plane crash flying high above the Rocky Mountains.
Director Renny Harlin teamed up with a star in Stallone whose career had stumbled slightly the past couple of years with critical flops Oscar and Stop! Or My My Mom Will Shoot. However together they deliver an exercise in fraught tension, terrific action set pieces and spectacular scenery in a high octane action adventure that reinstated Stallone as box office gold.
Shot before the days of instant CGI, Cliffhanger boasts an aerial stunt of breathtaking proportions with a crossing via cable line between two planes at an altitude of 15,000 feet which at the time was the most expensive aerial stunt ever filmed and probably remains so. The rest of the film is equally stunning with the rest of filming taking place high up in the Italian Dolomite mountains.
One thing that did irk a little was the main theme from Trevor Jones that pretty much pilfered key cues from his Last of the Mohicans score with Randy Edelman from the year previous. That being one of my favourite film scores made me think WTF? the first couple of times it appeared in Cliffhanger.
Although a favourite of mine and a film that transfers through the formats as my collection changes - cinema to vhs to dvd and now to Blu-ray thanks to StudioCanal's gorgeous looking 2018 restoration - i hadn't seen it in several years and tonight it felt like revisiting an old friend and catching up with the good times.
|