Release Year: 2000 Rating: PG-13 Duration: 124 minutes Director: Martin Campbell Producer: Lloyd Phillips, Martin Campbell, Robert King Distributor: Columbia Tristar
Its shadow falls on a vertical rock face being climbed by Peter Garrett, his father and sister Annie. Suddenly, a backpack hurtles by, followed rapidly by two climbers, whose ropes tear the male Garretts from the rock face. The excruciatingly tense sequence ends in tragedy. Then at the Himalayas, where tycoon Elliott Vaughn has financed an expedition that will take him to the summit of K2--the world's second highest mountain. Annie is one of Elliott's party. In the face of a threatening storm, Elliott recklessly insists the climb should continue. The storm duly arrives and decimates the expedition, leaving Elliott and Annie stranded. Peter leads a group of climbers--including the grizzled Montgomery Wick and a French-Canadian nurse)--in a rescue attempt.
I must confess that I am vertically challenged, meaning that when I peer down a deep crevasse, my palms get sweaty and my knees go weak. So, despite its inherent implausibility, this suspenseful excursion into mountain-climbing had my heart pounding - but it was more my acrophobia than the cliffhanger by writers Robert King and Terry Hayes and director Martin Campbell ("The Mask of Zorro"). Lifting liberally from "K2," "Wages of Fear" and the IMAX film "Everest," the story begins with high drama on a cliff in Moab, Utah, where Peter Garrett (Chris O'Donnell) and sister Annie (Robin Tunney) survive a rock-climbing accident that costs the life of their father (Stuart Wilson). Flash forward several years: Peter has traded his carabiners for cameras, photographing snow leopards in the Himalayas for National Geographic, while Annie, now a hotshot mountaineer, has joined with another expert (Nicholas Lea) to lead Elliot Vaughn (Bill Paxton), a millionaire entrepreneur - think Richard Branson, to the summit of the world's second highest peak, a commercial stunt perfectly timed coincide with a fly-over of a plane from his new airline. But when they're trapped in a cavern by an avalanche with just 36 hours to live, Peter assembles his own motley team, led by a Jeremiah Johnson-like recluse (Scott Glenn), to lug canisters of nitroglycerin up to blast through and rescue them.
