A good survival thriller, but a boring romance.
If there’s any reason to see The Mountain Between Us, it’s the commendable work of both Idris Elba and Kate Winslet in its lead roles. More specifically, the energy that the film manages to create during their scenes together in its first half, which are more exciting than they arguably have any right to be. And they serve as a healthy reminder of how genuinely entertaining it can be to just watch two masters of their craft bounce off of each other for several minutes, no matter the topic they’re discussing or challenging situation they’ve found themselves in.
To its credit, The Mountain Between Us doesn’t waste much time getting to those scenes either. Picking up immediately in a Denver airport, the film quickly introduces us to Alex (Winslet) and Ben (Elba), a photojournalist and neurosurgeon whose flights are suddenly cancelled by an oncoming storm, leaving them both stranded for another night. But with Alex needing to get to New York on time for her wedding and Ben needing to get to Baltimore for an important surgery, the two decide to charter a private flight together over the snow-capped mountains in order to get to their destinations on time.
All of that is, of course, derailed when their plane’s pilot (played briefly by Beau Bridges) suffers a stroke mid-flight and the plane crashes. Upon waking up, Ben and Alex are then stuck trying to survive as long as they can in the unbelievable cold, with very little food to share between the two of them.
So from the very beginning, The Mountain Between Us has a fairly effective and dire survival thriller premise on its hands. Thanks to its well-established characters and even more talented actors inhabiting the roles, it has a fun and likable duo ready to lead the way. It won’t come as much of a surprise then to say that the section of the film when Alex and Ben are stuck inside the crumbling remains of the plane, coming up with increasingly ingenious ways to survive, is when The Mountain Between Us is at its very best.
But it’s when they decide to embark on a journey down the mountain to any nearby sign of civilization that the film starts to lose its steam. Not only does the danger of other wildlife or death increasingly fade away, but the film decides to start building up a romantic spark between Alex and Ben. Now, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to believe that the two could develop some passionate feelings for each other, since the situation and intimacy does lend to that, as much as it just feels like a jarring tonal and thematic shift from the survival thriller notes of its first half.
As Alex and Ben’s relationship grows so does the cheesiness of the film’s writing and storylines. What started out as genuine fear for the characters lives’ quickly turns into melodramatic twists designed only to bring them closer together, culminating in a final twenty minutes that not only drags on, but fails to feel genuine or touching. In perhaps no other film this year have the start and end points felt quite so distant and unrelated to each other.
For his part, director Hany Abu-Assad excels when staging the film’s various action set-pieces and photographing the cold, tundra-like environment that Alex and Ben find themselves stuck in. However, while he finds interesting ways to shoot and edit some of the film’s predictable and clunky moments, he’s never quite able to recapture the same thrills or emotions as he had early on in its runtime. The same can be said for the rest of the film.
The Verdict
The Mountain Between Us has a surprisingly effective and engaging first half, filled with fun and tense survival sequences with Idris Elba and Kate Winslet. But that just makes it even more frustrating when the film forfeits any real sense of danger for the sake of developing an unnecessary and cliched romance between their two characters.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire