If you like mountain climbing, you may well enjoy this movie. Despite the repellent characters and screaming-out-of-the-roof-of-your-head-obvious plot, it has lots and lots of mountain climbing. Those of you who don’t should probably not read any more of this review, it won’t really be relevant. I’ve never understood mountain climbing. Edmund Hillary’s comment about climbing mountains because they were there always seemed inordinately silly. So, I may be the wrong one to review this wretched melodrama because I see nothing intrinsically heroic about a group of people trying to climb a mountain. In this case, a group of very obnoxious characters — the most tolerable one still left his wife and infant son back home so he could risk his life on the mountain because his friend badgered him into the trip. Some die, some don’t make it, some change. The mountain is K2. Intentionally or not, the film reinforced my negative perception of major expedition mountain climbers as arrogant and driven people with something very strange to prove. Perhaps this isn’t true but you wouldn’t think otherwise from this movie. At the funeral for two climbers killed in a major expedition’s test run, obnoxious super-climber Taylor Brooks (Biehn) accosts English billionaire expedition leader Phillip Claiborne (Barry). Belligerently, Brooks asks if he and his friend Jamison (Craven) can join the team, replacing not-yet-buried team members. Eventually they do and then they’re all off to climb the mountain. K2 opens with a tense scene of Brooks climbing up the face of a mountain. Surprisingly, the film never offers this much tension again, and though some of the shots are spectacular, the film is visually dull. Twenty years later, I still remember the vivid avalanche in The White Hell Of Pitz Palu, (a German mountain film from 1930 starring Leni Riefenstahl). At the end of K2, I was glad to leave the theatre, the company had been offensive and the action and scenery not nearly spectacular enough to make it up.
This article appears in May 8 • 1992 (Cover).