Vertical Limit Review

Let`s start 24,000 feet up - human beings` vertical limit. Above that we can`t survive, not for long anyway. Which is why climbing mountains like K2 the second highest in the world is pretty risky......Peter Garrett - Chris O`Donnell - is photographing snow leopards in the Himalayas when he hears that his sister Annie - Robin Tunney - is arriving to lead an assault on K2 with billionaire businessman Elliot Vaughn - Bill Paxton. Peter and Annie have a complex history involving a climbing accident with their father. When things go horribly wrong with the K2 climb Peter assembles a group of volunteers to go to the rescue - they include madcap iconoclastic Australian brothers Ben Mendelsohn and Steve le Marquand, an Pakistani porter who`s cousin died in the first attempt -Alexander Siddig, beautiful nurse Izabella Scorupo and a loner Scott Glenn who`s been searching the mountains for years for his wife who died in Vaughn`s first attempt at the mountain. There`s the time factor, the human nature factor and the nature factor...I find it hard to watch individual sequences in movies that have to do with height, I`ve got the James Stewart disease. And in fact for a lot of this film I just couldn`t watch the screen it was so death-defyingly and convincingly terrifying. Because these people are either very incompetent or really really unlucky, they just strike one disaster after another. Director Martin Campbell uses whatever technology is at his disposal to create an exhilarating sense of danger. The characters are not so important as the situations but nevertheless it`s interesting that those who come through strongest are the Australians - Mendelsohn and le Marquand as well as Robert Taylor who`s cast as an expert climber left in charge of the base. I think I had a good time with Vertical Limit