{"id":915703,"date":"2026-07-06T05:51:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T05:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/915703\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T05:51:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T05:51:13","slug":"perilous-and-preposterous-cliffhanger-brought-stallone-back-from-the-brink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/915703\/","title":{"rendered":"Perilous and Preposterous, \u2018Cliffhanger\u2019 Brought Stallone Back From the Brink"},"content":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s a \u201cgood-bad\u201d movie?<\/a> It\u2019s the kind of flick that might have you cackling, hollering or groaning, one that is not necessarily great cinema but is great fun. It\u2019s highly watchable even though \u2014 or maybe because \u2014 it\u2019s memorably ridiculous. And it always has at least one element that pushes it into absurd territory.<\/p>\n

Sylvester Stallone\u2019s superstar status was hanging by a thread when he agreed to \u201cCliffhanger,\u201d Renny Harlin\u2019s vertigo-inducing thriller that required the man who played Rocky and Rambo to hang by a literal thread \u2014 OK, a fraying rope.<\/p>\n

Coming off a series of duds, including \u201cStop! Or My Mom Will Shoot\u201d and \u201cLock Up,\u201d it was a make-or-break project for Stallone, whose reputation had floundered since earning two Oscar nominations for his 1976 triumph, \u201cRocky.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery mistake I could have made, I made,\u201d he told The New York Times<\/a> while warming himself in a gas-heated tent near a mountaintop in the Dolomites, where \u201cCliffhanger\u201d was primarily filmed, a year before its 1993 release. So, he gave this movie his absolute all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to cross that finish line done, played, completely out of gas,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

This dedication to extremity paid off, propelling \u201cCliffhanger\u201d to global box-office success<\/a> and heralding a return to form as a herculean hero with a complicated soul. His character, Gabe Walker, is a traumatized rescue ranger forced to outwit the psychopathic villain Eric Qualen (John Lithgow), who is attempting a midair heist of a U.S. Treasury plane carrying $100 million over the Colorado Rockies.<\/p>\n

Whether the movie is fundamentally good or bad had Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert famously exchanging barbs<\/a> in a heated debate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe movie is filled with howlingly bad scenes,\u201d Siskel said. An incredulous Ebert, who called the mountain-climbing set pieces \u201ctruly sensational,\u201d said, \u201cI got a feeling of involvement and fear, and the movie did work for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exactly that overlap \u2014 where howl-worthy meets heart-pounding \u2014 that elevates \u201cCliffhanger\u201d to good-bad immortality.<\/p>\n

What Makes It Good?<\/p>\n

An Opening Sequence for the Ages
and Scenery Galore<\/p>\n

At the time, Harlin described<\/a> this movie as a throwback to big-action thrillers, \u201cthe kind that cost a lot because they have to be shot outdoors and can\u2019t be faked with computer imagery or on studio lots.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this commitment to a real death-defying backdrop that makes the cinematography more eye-popping than ever in our current era of ubiquitous C.G.I. and creeping A.I.<\/p>\n

Harlin was so dedicated to practical effects, he actually managed to make one in particular highly impractical: sending a stunt person to cross on a cable strung between two aircraft flying at 15,000 feet. Simon Crane was paid a million dollars to do it, a feat that still holds the Guinness World Record<\/a> for most expensive aerial stunt.<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t Harlin\u2019s only bold decision: In the opening sequence, a contender for the best in action-movie history, Gabe tries his best to rescue a woman whose harness broke, but she slips from his hand. And, like Gabe, we look into her eyes as she falls to her death.<\/p>\n

The movie \u201cwastes no time in establishing its first priority, that of sending its audience into a cold sweat,\u201d Janet Maslin wrote in her Times review<\/a>. \u201cThis effect is achieved spectacularly well.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Makes It Bad?<\/p>\n

A So-So Script<\/p>\n

Corny \u201990s puns can often be good-bad gold, but the many generic one-liners here \u2014 like \u201ckeep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times!\u201d \u2014 mostly land with a shrug.<\/p>\n

The meh-ness is particularly glaring with Qualen\u2019s crew of thugs, who seem to have been assembled solely on the basis of who could make the smarmiest quips.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the dialogue given to Jessie (Janine Turner), a search-and-rescue pilot and Gabe\u2019s girlfriend, and Hal (Michael Rooker), a ranger and Gabe\u2019s former best buddy, lend the movie humanity and depth, just not enough to offset the middling wisecracks.<\/p>\n

What Makes It Good-Bad?<\/p>\n

A Peak Eurotrash Accent<\/p>\n

Logic-flouting action \u2014 say, Gabe riding a bad guy like a sled or impaling another on a stalactite \u2014 gives \u201cCliffhanger\u201d its wacky edge. But ultimately it\u2019s Lithgow, with his operatic performance and wildly fluctuating accent, who steals the show.<\/p>\n

While Harlin envisioned David Bowie<\/a> as Qualen, Christopher Walken was initially cast. But early in production, Walken walked, leaving Lithgow with no time to prepare.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember sitting around with Renny Harlin trying to decide what nationality Eric Qualen was,\u201d Lithgow told GQ in 2022<\/a>. \u201cWas he an American Secret Service man, maybe a South African? Or how about an Englishman?\u201d In the end, they decided to \u201cjust go the Alan Rickman route,\u201d referring to Rickman\u2019s geographically-muddled accent as the evildoer Hans Gruber in \u201cDie Hard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What\u2019s a \u201cgood-bad\u201d movie? It\u2019s the kind of flick that might have you cackling, hollering or groaning, one…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":915704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[310475,369996,189011,171,15094,369995,2581,286054,53,318390,255513,66896,189010,171000,170999,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-915703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-box-office-sales","tag-cliffhanger-movie","tag-ebert","tag-entertainment","tag-gene","tag-harlin","tag-john","tag-lithgow","tag-movies","tag-nineteen-hundred-nineties","tag-renny","tag-roger","tag-siskel","tag-stallone","tag-sylvester","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116871475125476049","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/915704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}