Cliffhanger (1993) begins by undermining the heroic screen image of the square-jawed Sylvester Stallone, who also co-wrote the movie. In Renny Harlin’s snowy action thriller, he plays Gabe, a member of a small Colorado search-and-rescue squad who takes on the sorts of physical missions no one else can or wants to. His specialty is free climbing — a godsend when you’re dealing with frightened callers who’ve too bravely scaled up to a high height they’re at a loss about getting down from — and at the start of the film it’s put to seemingly ordinary use when he’s tasked with helping fellow ranger Hal (Michael Rooker) and Hal’s girlfriend, Sarah (Michelle Joyner), get off a skinny peak they’ve gotten trapped on after an ill-advised climb. (Sarah is implied to have almost no previous experience doing this.)  

Gabe is being assisted by his pilot coworkers Frank and Jessie (Ralph White and Janine Turner), and it’s all just-another-day-on-the-job joking around until it’s not. Hal easily slides across one end of the makeshift cliff-to-helicopter zip line in the sky, but Sarah only makes it about a quarter before it becomes clear that she hasn’t been securely fastened. One hopes for the best during this sweaty-palms opening scene where Harlin effortlessly makes everything that could go wrong so visually intelligible that the hair on the back of your neck also nervously waits for, say, a whooshing gust of wind to interrupt a moment where every fraction of a second could manifest in tragedy. But the worst comes true purely from human fallibility. When the cameras home in on Sarah’s face and hands as they slip out of the struggling-to-help Gabe’s, the slow motion used doesn’t feel cheap but like a visual corollary of what it feels like to have your stomach drop. 

Cliffhanger jumps ahead eight months, a time during which Gabe has all but vanished post-funeral — something that hurts not just Hal, who already blames his one-time friend for Sarah’s death, but also Jessie, whom he was in a relationship with. They reconnect after he appears at her farmhouse doorstep one day, asking her to come with him to wherever he lives now. She would prefer not to run away from her life, so she encourages him to stop “hoarding all the guilt.” 

Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger.

The movie eventually positions itself as something of a feature-length redemption — or at least confidence-boosting reminder of what had made him great at his job — for Gabe after being unintentionally responsible for the unthinkable. Stallone and his co-screenwriter, Michael France, set up a B plot where a group of mercenaries attempt a skybound hijacking (shot with thrilling how-did-do-that panache) of a government plane carrying three suitcases that between them hold $100 million in uncirculated bills. It goes poorly. The suitcases don’t reach the bad guys’ plane, scattering instead across the snowy terrain below. The mercenaries’ cool-blonde pilot (Caroline Goodall) has to figure out an on-the-fly crash landing that will pull the plane in half even if it’s successful. 

Through deception — this ice-maiden British airwoman feigns a goody-goody American accent into a radio microphone and tearily fibs about some running-out insulin — Hal and a very hesitant Gabe are called to help who they think are just stranded hikers. Absurdly, the suitcases are able to be found because they all have beeping tracking devices that come complete with second-hand screens showing their location from a satellite-eye view. 

The cast of Cliffhanger.

Hal and Gabe immediately get to work trying to outsmart mostly British captors who are as nastily spirited as they are shoot-themselves-in-the-foot stupid. They’re so immediately quick to injure or doubt the only men who could possibly help them out of their mess that you might moan at your TV like a voice of reason trying to be heard through miles-thick plexiglass. (The head of the group is played by a delightful John Lithgow, whose faux English accent is deliciously vinegary and who near-exclusively speaks in one-liners that might never be followed by an evil cackle but might as well be in our memory.) 

The cat-and-mouse shenanigans can get monotonous. Cliffhanger might have packed more of a wallop if it were taut and condensed, not stretched out to fill nearly two hours. And it creates a problem for itself by not knowing what to do with Jessie, an obviously capable woman who eventually arrives to help but exists only to bleat, scream, and be saved by Gabe, who wears way less clothing than is sensible so that Stallone can proudly show off his rippling, veiny arms. (He and France laughably write it so that the villains command him to take off his outer layer for no discernible reason when doing the free-climb on which the entire mission hinges.) 

Still, Cliffhanger is mostly slick, effective action filmmaking that demonstrates Harlin’s preternatural way of making fluid the kind of complicated, pulse-pounding set piece that another director could easily turn into a visual salad. (The movie also strikes a good balance between using real topography and matte illusions, making the cold feel real and punishing and able to turn from majestic to scarily unpredictable when you’re not wandering around it purely for pleasure.) It’s a ridiculous movie, but at its best you take its action-movie achievements seriously.