The Mountain Between Us ** (2017, Idris Elba, Kate Winslet, Beau Bridges, Dermot Mulroney) – Movie Review

Director Hany Abu-Assad’s relentlessly old-fashioned mix of survival movie and romantic drama The Mountain Between Us limps along enjoyably enough, though without much conviction or credibility. It has some tense, exciting scenes, but it also regularly stalls in talky sequences when you just want them to get on with it, get the characters moving and the action shifted. At the end of the day, there are no real surprises. The film is just there, up there on screen, and then, unremarkably, it’s over.

Idris Elba and Kate Winslet are brisk, capable and highly professional, as Ben and Alex, two middle-aged strangers who join forces at an airport to get to their destination in a night-time storm by chartering old pilot Beau Bridges’s two-seater plane. Elba’s a brain surgeon who has to get to an operation next morning; Winslet’s got to get to her wedding. How remarkably pat and convenient for the script (based on Charles Martin’s novel) all this is.

Talking script, some of the dialogue in Chris Weitz’s screenplay is actually quite good, some of it drossy, a tiny bit of it a bit daft. Once the romance kicks in, it all gets too Mills and Boon eventually. But that’s another story. The romantic story. Indeed the romantic story is by far the weaker of the two parallel tales. They’d have done well to ditch the romance entirely, and just have a survival movie. Much better!

[Spoiler alert] Anyway, inevitably, Ben and Alex’s old pilot suffers a stroke, their plane crashes on a remote snow-covered mountain, and Bridges is killed, but his cute dog survives along with Ben and Alex, though she ends up with a smashed bad leg and a smashed dead mobile. Ben’s cell of course can get no signal and the battery’s getting low. Help is not at hand and danger is.

After three days or so, Ben still wants to stay put in the wreckage waiting for rescue, but Alex thinks help is apparently definitely not coming and sets off with the dog on a perilous journey across the wilderness. Ben wakes up, reads her note, and rushed off to follow. Can they forge a connection? Can they survive the extreme elements? Oh, come on then!

In real life, maybe they could forge a connection but there is no way they could survive the extreme elements and other little problems they encounter here, just no way. OK, it’s only a movie, but it does require conviction, though, to be fair, the two hard-working stars do manage to give it a veneer of credibility.

Are we really supposed to believe that Alex could route march across hundreds of miles of snowy wilderness on that gammy leg? I don’t think so! And that dog – throughout it looks like it’s just come out of its kennel after a darned good dinner. Pal or Kennomeat, or a good steak, I wonder? Whatever, it’s way too bright eyed and bushy tailed. Winset looks nice and smashed up, but not so Fido.

Talking credibility, it is hard to buy Elba as a brilliant brain surgeon, or even Winslet as a super-talented American photo-journalist for The Guardian. These are just escapist fantasy jobs, defying the actors to inhabit the space. [Spoiler alert] Did we have to have Elba and Winslet bonking on the mountain? Oh dear, really? This is known as ‘a scene of sexuality’ on the Motion Picture Rating guidance, but their sex scene again defies the actors to inhabit the space.

There is a large cast list of about another dozen people, but the movie is basically just a two-hander. This leads to a bit of boredom too, though it’s better than a one-hander like Cast Away, the fate of two folks doubling the interest in the film. There are two other significant roles, or there could be, but Bridges has zero to do with nothing screen time as the pilot, and that’s also true for Dermot Mulroney as the nice, loyal fiancé. The film would be a lot stronger with proper roles for these good actors.

The film also might have worked better with younger characters, and not felt quite so middle aged, though Elba and Winslet certainly give off enough determined vibe to make their characters work.

The Mountain Between Us was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and London, England.

Actually, two well-fed dogs play the dog – Raleigh and Austin.

Michael Fassbender was originally cast as Ben.

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists voted Winslet the 2018 winner of the award for Actress Most in Need of a New Agent for this film.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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