Cliffhanger - Sly Stallone is a climbing instructor (?). The first ten minutes had me sweating and white knuckling my palms. When they were over and I started sending O2 back to my brain I had to get up and leave.
If you haven't seen it (besides being very lucky) you won't understand. Okay, how did he get the girl up there? Why did he let her (she's stupid so I won't ask why she did it, but why did he let her) bring a teddy bear in her daypack?
She's sliding hand over hand across the rope and she's buckled into it. The strongest part of that system is the buckle, and that's what breaks. Okay, so both of her hands are on the rope and the buckle breaks so he lets go of the rope and grabs the harness below the buckle.
SHE LETS GO OF THE ROPE.
I'm afraid of heights and when I repelled at ROTC I had to have a LONG talk with my guide hand to get it to LOOSEN enough for me to slide down. Let me tell you people, if she had her hands in contact with anything, the first few layers of skin would have fused with the rope. Sly would have had to bring her and the rope if he wanted her to get down.
Okay, she can't reach Sly. Then the buckle slips even more. She slides DOWN and falls into his hand. How in Allah's name did she slide down to go UP?
Hanging by one sweaty, slipping hand with nothing between herself and falling to a splattering death that she is so afraid of that they had to call in a helicopter and a leading man to rescue her she reaches out to grab her teddy bear that fell out of her pack.
GIVE ME A BREAK!!!
I won't even go into the actual plot (why steal money that can't go into circulation? How do you survive an icy-river swim in a wife-beater and parachute pants? How can a moth-eaten sweater stop hypothermia? It goes on and on).
Executive Decision – Kurt Russell and (groan before the movie even starts) Steven Segal. The only good thing about this movie is Segal dies early on. I wasn't too sure they wouldn't figure out some way to have him live, but I didn't stick around to find out.
Russell is whisked out of a dinner party to fly with Segal and "An Engineer" to get aboard a hijacked plane. They take a helicopter to get on a plane designed to rescue astronauts off the space shuttle. The rescue plane is an F117.
It's a STEALTH RESCUE PLANE.
Why is it stealth? Don't they want the astronauts to know they're being rescued? Will that make the astronauts try harder?
So they sneak up on the plane and extend this tube thingie that let's the people go between the aircraft. How does it attach to the other plane? Is it magnetic? Aren't planes made of aluminum? I think magnetics only work on nickel and iron. Maybe it's suction, but wait, they're at altitude. The air pressure outside is already so low that people would pass out from lack of O2 (like I wished I had). I don't know how they connected, but they did okay, but they don't connect very well.
Russell climbs up and sees that the hatch is closed so he calls for "The Engineer" who: TURNS THE HANDLE! Good thing he brought him, cuz you know Kurt's been locked inside his own car a couple of times and those handle things are so technical.
I got up to leave, but my uncle, at whose house I was watching, no wincing at this movie, grabbed my arm and made me watch for another 30 seconds. I suppose you can go into oxygen depravation for up to two minutes so even though my eyes were strangling my brain in a desperate effort to make me leave the room, I survived with little brain damage (unlike this movie).
What he wanted me to see was the tube thingie falling off and Segal falling to his (hopeful) death. "Wasn't that cool and clever to kill off the star this early in the movie?" My Uncle asked. Yeah, now what're they going to do, they only have Kurt Russell to save the day, but that can't be right, he's a nobody…
Oh, did I mention that while crawling around the cargo bay of the hijacked plane Russell finds time to change clothes into something more comfy.
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