"I Don't Wanna Die Up Here Because You Are Too Scared To Take A Risk..."
Based upon the novel of the same name by American author Charles Martin, director Hany Abu-Assad takes his first big budget chance with The Mountain Between Us, a romantic survivalist drama featuring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba in the leading roles as journalist Alex Martin and Dr. Ben Bass, strangers who are stranded in the heartland of the wilderness after the crash of their charter plane. Whilst survivalist tales are not uncommon, with the likes of The Revenant and even It Comes at Night showcasing the genre-bending facet of the much explored narrative of man's basic instinct to keep on going, Assad's movie suffers primarily from a nonexistent level of threat, one which weakens the majority of the film's first half, and a central relationship from two of Hollywood's most bankable actors which not only lacks any sort of meaningful authenticity but is completely vacant of romantic chemistry, resulting in a schmaltzy mess of a movie which even manages to make its' icy surroundings feel placid and dull.
With Elba and Winslet sinking to levels thought impossible in terms of their performances, Assad uses the first ten minutes of the movie to complete the setup, placing our leading duo in a contrived state of confusion which results in them deciding to fly together upon the creakiest, most unsafe charter plane possible, and whilst the inner shot of the plane's inevitable descent onto the snowy terrains below is actually pretty well done, the subsequent ninety minutes is an exercise in mediocrity, with the narrative choosing to repeat the same notions over and over again without any sense of threat or belief that our leading heroes will subsequently perish, with the movie coming across instead as the type of saccharin-flavoured money grabber which even decides to save the dog when the whole audience was expecting a mutt-flavoured barbecue to occur upon the screen. With no sense of peril or real meaningful characterisation, the concluding portion of the film's romance-based section is inevitably gooey and pointless, and whilst The Mountain Between Us isn't the worst example of survivalist dramas, it is certainly the tackiest.
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