Cliffhanger
By Peter John Gardner
If my memory serves me well, which all too often it does not, this is the first Stallone movie that I saw in the theater. Normally that wouldn't be something that one commemorates, but I guess it's relevant to the Project. I saw it with my friend Scott, who looked like a human version of Bart Simpson, and I recall us in the theater saying to each other, "This would make an AWESOME videogame!"
Cliffhanger eventually was made into a videogame, and it was far from awesome. The movie, on the other hand, still holds up as a solid action movie. It starts off with Stallone accidentally letting his friend fall to their death from thousands of feet in the air between mountain tops. Haunted by the event, Stallone goes into exile. Monthes later, he returns to the mountain rescue team for reasons left unexplained in the movie, and walks right into a terrorist situation where the bad guys have crashed their plane in the mountains and lost several suitcases full of money in the crash. Stallone and his team are forced to help.
These are cool terrorists, though, because they're led by John Lithgow! Even when he's killing his own henchmen, it's hard not to love Lithgow. The guy was born to play a villain. I'd join a heist with him.
As with just about every action movie from the late 80s/early 90s, there are plot holes galore, but as long as you're willing to turn your brain off for two hours, "Cliffhanger" is good. Unable to secure permits to film in the USA, the filmmakers filmed all the mountain sequences in Europe, so the scenery in the movie is breathtaking, and the filmmakers use all the mountains, waterfalls, and cliffs to their advantage. Really, it's refreshing to watch a well made Stallone movie after suffering through stuff like "Rhinestone" and "Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot".
That being said, this is still a Stallone action movie, and it doesn't have any themes or messages that I haven't covered already in past entries. This project has become an exercise in pulling something out of nothing, and these past few entries have had me pulling nothing out of nothing. I guess I'll go with a metaphor. Stallone lets his friend literally slip out of his hand at the beginning of the movie, and she plummets to her death. I've let a few women slip through my fingers over the course of my life. I'm oblivious when it comes to flirtation a lot of times. I either chalk it up to general playfulness, or I don't pick up on the signals at all until long after the fact. I'm not exactly the type of guy that women clamor for, so when it does happen, I'm usually ignorant.
"Peter, she was trying to flirt with you"
"Huh? Really?"
"Um...YEAH!"
"Oh...really? Me?"
"Shut up, peter"
It's a good thing these poor girls didn't fall thousands of feet to their death afterwards.
