The Emotional Void of ‘The Mountain Between Us’ (FILM REVIEW)

[rating=3.00]

A new Twitter marketing campaign for The Mountain Between Us proudly proclaims that “the dog lives,” assuring prospective audiences that they won’t have to sit through that most sickening of cinematic experiences. While the dog does, indeed, survive, graciously protecting us from the emotional gut punch of caninicide, I can’t help but noting that a dog dying would have been the only thing that this movie could have done to make me feel anything at all.

There’s no mountain between me and this movie, but there sure is an emotional void as wide as an ocean. Rarely does a film try this hard and fall so flat; it’s lack of connection is damn near impressive considering it lets the bulk of its weight get carried by two of the finer actors of our day, Idris Elba and Kate Winslet. The duo do their best to turn a poorly written script into something worth caring about, but in the end they’re still just hauling around a lifeless corpse and hoping no one notices its lack of a heartbeat.

It’s difficult to tell where exactly this script went so wrong, though I suspect it has something to do with J. Mills Goodloe. Goodloe, who also penned the emotionally vacant Everything, Everything from earlier this year, wrote the first draft of the screenplay, which was later rewritten by Chris Weitz. Weitz, who’s written works such as Rogue One, About a Boy, and the surprisingly complex Antz, certainly has a better track record than Goodloe, whose best script so far is the abysmal The Age of Adaline (a film you’ve no doubt forgotten existed until this very moment).

We could blame the story itself—two strangers (Elba and Winslet) whose flights get cancelled due to an impending storm charter a small plane to get them to Denver ahead of the storm, only for their pilot (Beau Bridges, whose always a delight to see) to suffer a stroke mid-flight, causing them to crash in the Rocky Mountains—for being chaff, except that it’s based on a successful novel by Charles Martin. Clearly, there’s something in the story itself that people are connecting with, though you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the movie.

It’s to their credit that Elba and Winslet elevate this film towards something watchable. Well, something like it, at any rate. While this rote and predictable love story becomes no less rote nor predictable in their hands, they’re the kind of performers who bring life to whatever role they take. It’s a shame they weren’t given more to work with beyond the flat, cookie cutter characters they were provided.

The longer the script meanders through the will they/won’t they plotline, the less possible it is to care whether or not they even survive their ordeal, let alone where their romance ends up by the end of it. As written, both characters come off as obnoxious with few redeeming qualities. Indeed, the dog is often the most interesting part of the movie. His mournful whines over his master’s death are heartbreaking to endure and I found myself caring more about him than either character at various points throughout the movie.

But hey, at least we know going into it that the dog survives. And the movie does give us an excuse to witness some great cinematography at the hands of Mandy Walker. British Columbia stands in for the Rocky Mountains, and Walker manages to capture these imposing figures in all their majesty. For his part, director Hany Abu-Assad constructs his scenes well—the plane crash, in particular, is done beautifully—and he, too, does what he can to elevate the film above its script.

That, it seems, is an impossible mission. No combination of stars or director would be able to overcome the flat and uninteresting material they’ve been given to work with. This script is a deadly tumor, that unfortunately renders the rest of the film, as good as it often almost is, DOA. Lifeless, dull, and emotionally vacuous, The Mountain Between Us is a trek best skipping.

The Mountain Between Us is now playing in theaters everywhere.

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