‘Don’t bother to buckle up – you may not want to survive this...’
Finnish director Renny Harlin is never going to win an Oscar. When it comes to pure entertainment, however, he is a steady hand. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Die Hard 2 and Deep Blue Sea are all a lot of things. Boring isn’t one of them. Now, Sylvester Stallone also knows a thing or two about entertainment. Stick Harlin and Stallone together on top of a clifftop and it will only end one way…
Gabe Walker (Stallone), an experienced rock climber, suffers a traumatic experience that leads to the death of his friend’s girlfriend. Cut to a year later and Walker is out of the climbing business but returns to the scene of the accident in an attempt to reconnect with his true love Jessie (Janine Turner). In an extraordinary coincidence, Walker’s return coincides with a botched mid-air heist led by John Lithgow’s hilariously villainous Eric Qualen.
This is an action film. I state this here because Harlin seems to have taken that brief incredibly literally resulting in a film that is literally all action all of the time. Not a second ticks by without a fistfight, a gunfight, an explosion, some cliffhanging… it’s exhausting. But in a fun way. Don’t try to make sense of it. That’s not what it’s for. Cliffhanger is a turn-off-brain movie. A mode of being that Harlin is incredibly well suited for. How this will translate to the traditionally more slow-paced Strangers franchise (a trilogy of Harlin-helmed sequels has been announced) is anyone’s guess. It will be fun finding out.
In Stallone, Harlin has his perfect leading man. The sad eyes. The big muscles. The dodgy one-liners. All of it fits perfectly into this world and it helps that Lithgow and Michael Rooker also understand the brief. The women aren’t given much to do besides look pretty and be in distress, but this is an action film and it was the mid-90s. A simpler time.
Cliffhanger is a high-octane thrill ride (a phrase that surely appeared on the poster, in the trailer or both) that never lets up from start to finish. Impossible to resist.