Kate Winslet, Idris Elba
“THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US” My rating: C+
103 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
He’s a neurosurgeon desperate to get back to Baltimore for a big operation.
She’s a photojournalist desperate to get back east for her wedding.
With an incoming blizzard grounding commercial air traffic, they rent a charter plane to take them home.
Nope.
“The Mountain Between Us” is a survival tale/love story set in the Colorado Rockies and starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet as Ben and Alex, total strangers who must work together to survive when their plane crashes on a remote mountain top.
As an outdoor adventure crammed with drop-dead scenery and a plethora of adversity (hungry mountain lion, freezing temperatures, starvation, a fall through cracking lake ice) this film from director Hany Abu-Assad (an Israeli making his Hollywood debut) works well enough.
As a romance, though, it’s iffy. J. Mills Goodie’s screenplay (from Charles Martin’s novel) doesn’t really give us that much to work with, character-wise. Elba and Winslet are charismatic performers capable of suggesting depth where there is relatively little, but the script is skimpy with details, and what there is is a bit hokey. For way too long the state of Ben’s marriage is dangled before us like a mystery carrot.
Speaking of way too long…the movie continues a good 15 minutes after it should have ended; many viewers will develop a case of ants in their pants.
But there are some pretty impressive moments, especially the plane crash.
It’s a deliciously slow build, with Mandy Walker’s camera flowing effortlessly through the interior of the small airplane cabin, circling the passengers, the pilot (Beau Bridges, not long for this world) and his faithful Golden Lab as the air turbulence builds. No doubt it will convince some never to climb aboard an aircraft smaller than a 747.
And the mountains of British Columbia are simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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