THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US – Review

From a romance novel by Charles Martin, THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US is old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, a survival story that touches on themes of love, tragedy, and the kindness of strangers. It’s also old-fashioned dumb, with eye-rolling dialog,  a dreary pace, and a general lack of logic leaving the audience, like its characters, to trudge aimlessly across a vast snowy tundra. Guys: This weekend do not let your girlfriends drag you to this instead of BLADE RUNNER 2049!

Kate Winslet and Idris Elba star in THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US as a pair of travelers, strangers to each other, stranded at the Boise, Idaho airport thanks to an impending storm. Alex (Winslet) is a celebrated freelance photographer whose wedding is the next day. Ben (Elba) is a celebrated neurosurgeon scheduled to perform an operation on a ten-year old the next day. It’s like they are the only ones there with good reason to get home! Enter Walter (Beau Bridges) a cantankerous pilot and his (unnamed) dog who offer to transport the pair on his four-seater for the bargain price of $800. The old prop seems a bit rickety but Walter assures them there’s nothing to worry about since he flew in ‘Nam and is confident he get them to their destination “as long as no one’s shooting at me”. The sky is clear (curiously there are no further references to that storm that kept them stranded), but just as they’re flying over the Rockies, Walter starts babbling incoherently and his tongue flops out. “He’s having a stroke” diagnoses Ben (he’s a doctor) and the next thing you know the plane has crashed and Alex and Ben (and the pooch) find themselves stranded in its fuselage on top of the perilous, snow-covered mountains. Alex has suffered a nasty busted leg (but at least, as Ben helpfully informs her, her urine is clear – he’s a doctor) so he takes care of her by tending to her wounds. Since they’ve unfortunately neglected to tell a soul that they’ve boarded this small plane, there’s no search party. After their single bag of pecans, as well as some convenient mountain lion meat, is gone, they venture out into the unknown on foot. There they battle cold, dangerously thin ice, a bear trap, and starvation (no, they don’t eat the dog!). They eventually find an abandoned house and it’s there they decide that they’ve fallen in love and begin awkwardly making out though neither has brushed their teeth in three weeks  (eew!).

My problem with THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US is how pedestrian and formula it all is – a stale love story blandly told. Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, making his English language debut, exhibits little style. It was filmed in the Canadian Rockies and Mandy Walker’s cinematography is never lacking in shots of impressive snowy mountainscapes, but for such a gorgeously mounted epic it feels maddeningly remote. THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US may be an impressive production, but through most of it, I kept thinking about how difficult the filming conditions must have been, and not about the lives of the couple at the center of the story.

THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US is forced to coast on the appeal of its two attractive stars who, after weeks in the icy wilderness, still look awfully movie-star photogenic. Winslet and Elba aren’t bad, but they can only take things so far especially when saddled with sudsy sub-Nicolas Sparks groaners like “The heart is nothing but a muscle” (said twice!) and my favorite exchange: Him: “So, how did you end up in Idaho?” – Her: “I was photographing skinheads for The Nation”. THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US stumbles into too many cinematic triumph-over-adversity clichés and loses pace over its running time. It may not be one of the worst movies of the year, but it’s pretty bad.

1 1/2 of 5 Stars