At least the bulk of the movie has scenery as a distraction. Most of the time, character development is buried under fresh powder.Įlba and Winslet are as convincing as the plot and their lines allow, which is not very. drip, designed to just barely sustain the audience's interest. Mills Goodloe and Chris Weitz's script, which dispenses backstory as if through an I.V. The whole not-talking thing is frustrating and improbable, but essential to J. He's the strong and silent type who just doesn't want to talk about it. Alex is engaged, of course, and Ben is married. Indeed, the only mountain that separates Ben and Alex seems to be their commitment to other people. In the sticky tradition of The English Patient, grave injury and nursing, under drastic circumstances, lead to erotic swooning. Frostbite? That, too.Īs if to emphasize the predictability of it all, the director punctuates the episodes with lots of doggie reaction shots Scooby-Doo couldn't do better. Eventually, Alex insists on getting off the mountain, and Ben has little choice but to follow her.ĭuring their narratively unadventuresome adventure, Ben and Alex encounter perils as if checking them off a list. But her leg was mangled in the crash, so she cedes control of the situation to the more cautious Ben, whose own wounds don't seem to impair him. The third survivor? A golden retriever so agreeable he never asks to be fed during several weeks spent far from the nearest PetSmart.Īlex is the more impetuous of the human trekkers, and not just because she's in a rush to get to New York for her wedding. Alex (Kate Winslet) is an American crisis-zone photojournalist whose career, pluck, and name have been manned up from the novel (where she's a writer named Ashley). (In the book, it's Utah's High Uintas Wilderness.) Ben (Idris Elba) is a brusque British-expat surgeon whose skills will prove handy after he and two others survive a small plane's belly-flop into a snowy peak. Now dump all those geographic modifiers in the trash, because this movie takes place absolutely nowhere.ĭerived from Charles Martin's romance novel, the story pits middle-aged urban professionals against the primeval dangers of an unidentified mountain region.
Two British actors contend with a frozen North American hinterland in The Mountain Between Us, the first Hollywood effort by Palestinian-Dutch director Hany Abu-Assad. Snow, Crash: Alex (Kate Winslet) and Ben (Idris Elba) struggle for survival and narrative interest in The Mountain Between Us.
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