What’s a “good-bad” movie? It’s the kind of flick that might have you cackling, hollering or groaning, one that is not necessarily great cinema but is great fun. It’s highly watchable even though — or maybe because — it’s memorably ridiculous. And it always has at least one element that pushes it into absurd territory.
Sylvester Stallone’s superstar status was hanging by a thread when he agreed to “Cliffhanger,” Renny Harlin’s vertigo-inducing thriller that required the man who played Rocky and Rambo to hang by a literal thread — OK, a fraying rope.
Coming off a series of duds, including “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” and “Lock Up,” it was a make-or-break project for Stallone, whose reputation had floundered since earning two Oscar nominations for his 1976 triumph, “Rocky.”
“Every mistake I could have made, I made,” he told The New York Times while warming himself in a gas-heated tent near a mountaintop in the Dolomites, where “Cliffhanger” was primarily filmed, a year before its 1993 release. So, he gave this movie his absolute all.
“I want to cross that finish line done, played, completely out of gas,” he said.
This dedication to extremity paid off, propelling “Cliffhanger” to global box-office success 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.
Whether the movie is fundamentally good or bad had Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert famously exchanging barbs in a heated debate.
“The movie is filled with howlingly bad scenes,” Siskel said. An incredulous Ebert, who called the mountain-climbing set pieces “truly sensational,” said, “I got a feeling of involvement and fear, and the movie did work for me.”
It’s exactly that overlap — where howl-worthy meets heart-pounding — that elevates “Cliffhanger” to good-bad immortality.
What Makes It Good?
An Opening Sequence for the Ages and Scenery Galore
At the time, Harlin described this movie as a throwback to big-action thrillers, “the kind that cost a lot because they have to be shot outdoors and can’t be faked with computer imagery or on studio lots.”
It’s 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.
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 for most expensive aerial stunt.
And it wasn’t Harlin’s 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.
The movie “wastes no time in establishing its first priority, that of sending its audience into a cold sweat,” Janet Maslin wrote in her Times review. “This effect is achieved spectacularly well.”
What Makes It Bad?
A So-So Script
Corny ’90s puns can often be good-bad gold, but the many generic one-liners here — like “keep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times!” — mostly land with a shrug.
The meh-ness is particularly glaring with Qualen’s crew of thugs, who seem to have been assembled solely on the basis of who could make the smarmiest quips.
Fortunately, the dialogue given to Jessie (Janine Turner), a search-and-rescue pilot and Gabe’s girlfriend, and Hal (Michael Rooker), a ranger and Gabe’s former best buddy, lend the movie humanity and depth, just not enough to offset the middling wisecracks.
What Makes It Good-Bad?
A Peak Eurotrash Accent
Logic-flouting action — say, Gabe riding a bad guy like a sled or impaling another on a stalactite — gives “Cliffhanger” its wacky edge. But ultimately it’s Lithgow, with his operatic performance and wildly fluctuating accent, who steals the show.
While Harlin envisioned David Bowie as Qualen, Christopher Walken was initially cast. But early in production, Walken walked, leaving Lithgow with no time to prepare.
“I remember sitting around with Renny Harlin trying to decide what nationality Eric Qualen was,” Lithgow told GQ in 2022. “Was he an American Secret Service man, maybe a South African? Or how about an Englishman?” In the end, they decided to “just go the Alan Rickman route,” referring to Rickman’s geographically-muddled accent as the evildoer Hans Gruber in “Die Hard.”
All said and done, Lithgow added, “It was fabulous.”
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