OVP: Cliffhanger (1993)

Film: Cliffhanger (1993)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Paul Winfield

Director: Renny Harlin

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Visual Effects, Sound, Sound Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I don't mean to compare Stallone's career all month to Schwarzenegger's, but it's hard not to both because that's what the press did during their entire heyday and it's also hard when you look into the 1990's as they were on deeply different paths.  By the late 1980's, Schwarzenegger was regularly churning out hits in films like Predator, but the best was still to come.  For Stallone...the 1990's were a series of pitfalls.  It started with Rocky V, which made money but given the expectations after the last four films, was a disappointment.  But this would arguably be a high-point when you look at what would come next.  While Arnold was making mountains of money with Total Recall, Terminator 2, and True Lies (all films audiences adored), Stallone was working in truly crappy flicks like Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and Judge Dredd.  Even his films that made money, like The Specialist or Daylight, were critically-lambasted and were largely only popular overseas.  Stallone at this point was to the Razzie Awards what Meryl Streep was to the Oscars (fun fact-Stallone gave Meryl her Oscar for Sophie's Choice).

(Spoilers Ahead) The one really bright spot from the first half of the decade for Stallone was in 1993.  Cliffhanger is not a critically-acclaimed film by any means (and Stallone got nominated for Worst Screenplay at the Razzies), but it had decent reviews, and made a fortune.  One could argue it was the last unequivocally successful blockbuster built off of Stallone as a leading man.  The movie is about Gabe Walker (Stallone), a mountain rescue ranger who is traumatized by his friend Hal's (Rooker) girlfriend dying in the opening moments of the film from an accident while ziplining through the Colorado Rockies.  Walker largely checks out of his life and wants to leave it behind, taking his girlfriend Jessie (Turner) with him, but she refuses.  Meanwhile, a group of hijackers, headed by Eric Qualen (Lithgow) steal a fortune of $100 million aboard a US Treasury plane, but a mishap in the hijacking causes them to crash in the Rockies.  After tricking Hal, Jessie, & Gabe into rescuing them, this causes an increasingly staggering standoff, as Hal, Gabe, & Jessie try to stay alive as these people attempt to escape with all of the money.

Cliffhanger is a movie that is, and I say this lovingly, dumb as a post.  The plot of the film rarely makes sense beyond a second grader's description of an action film, and it is impossibly repetitive.  We have the same standoffs between Stallone, Lithgow, Rooker, and Rex Linn for about 60 minutes in a row.  But that shouldn't confuse with it a bad movie, as Cliffhanger is not a bad movie.

For starters, some of the action scenes are really well done.  The opening scene with Stallone desperately trying to save a doomed Michelle Joyner from falling to her death thousands of feet below is nerve-gripping...I was actively clutching a pillow wondering what would happen.  And the film as it progresses lives up to some of the camp of its premise, mostly because John Lithgow (with an accent that kind of has to be heard to be believed) acting as over-the-top as is humanly possible to keep the audience amused between Stallone getting different elaborate killing scenes in.  This is, like many of Stallone's films, a clear paycheck role for a decent actor who regularly was selling out...but that doesn't negate that it works more than it doesn't, and Stallone's everyman appeal is there, especially in the first half.