THE EDGE (64)

Directed by: Lee Tamahori

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, Harold Perrineau

The Pitch: Two men - a bookish millionaire and a slimy photographer with designs on his wife - must survive hunger, cold and man-eating bears when their plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness.

Theo Sez: ...or - to paraphrase a recent P. J. O'Rourke book title - "Age and Guile Beat Youth, Brashness and a Bad Haircut". That its hero is middle-aged, unfailingly courteous and reads books while all around him are showing off their designer watches makes this a highly unusual action movie - though it also attempts to have it both ways via the Character Development of a stale life revitalised, which is just a non-starter (even before the action starts our hero's clearly the most alive, most interesting person in the room, Hopkins' performance underlining the reserves of strength rather than the surface diffidence). The story itself is a rugged outdoor adventure with existentialist overtones (Man as the master of his own fate, etc etc), played straight in stunningly unprettified locations but rather weakened by a fuzziness about defining our hero's response to the hostile environment - does he master it by in effect regressing, matching it in savagery (contrasted, implicitly, with Baldwin's character, who can only bring himself to kill through Dutch courage), or does he actually impose his own civilised values on it, refusing to succumb to primitivism? Both versions are arguable, neither entirely clear ; still, the mere fact that such arguments should seem relevant to a pacy, undeniably exciting action flick is ample proof of the film's success.