Movie Review: Cliffhanger (1993)

The movie stars Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner and Caroline Goodall.

After being at work all day, I found I really wasn't in the mood to watch non-stop presidential election coverage and, instead, decided to settle down and watch a movie with my wife. After going through the several films we had previously recorded off of our movie channels, we decided to watch this one (while monitoring the election results via my laptop).

We both have seen this film before. However, when we started watching it last night, I realized I didn't remember anything about it. After seeing it again, I can say I thought it was a good movie but did have a slightly mixed opinion about it overall.

I think the best way to describe this movie is it is the typical 1990s action film. Character depth was somewhat limited and the movie's story was somewhat basic and a little predictable.

That being said, when it came to the overall action, this film did deliver. The movie maintained a fast pace with very little lull between the various fight scenes and perilous mountain climbing scenes.  As a result of this, even though the story was a little too easy to predict, unlike way too many other films in this genre, it never reached a point where I could describe it as boring.

I also liked how the movie gave a decent amount of screen time to Stallone's love interest (Turner) without making their relationship too much of the plot. Love interests/love scenes are fine. But, there are way too many movies that put too much emphasis on that and just aren't as good as a result.

As I said, the plot is very similar to other movies in this genre and, because of that, a little too predictable. However, the action scenes do make up for it enough to make the movie worth watching.

My Grade: B