A Lonely Place to Die movie review

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A Lonely Place to Die (2011)Melissa George

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A Lonely Place to Die
(2011)
It’s right there on the cover (which, granted, you don’t get to see when you rent a disc through Netflix): Melissa George, looking a little roughed up but still pretty hot. I approached this film with a little more enthusiasm following on the heels of Triangle; yeah, it looked like a typical ‘foolish people go out in the woods to die’ movie, but Triangle had looked typical and turned out to be anything but. The mains in this movie are mountain climbers, five of them; George plays Allison, who we learn early on takes her rock-climbing pretty seriously. The five characters convene somewhere in the Irish wilderness and start planning their strategies to climb an imposing mountain, when, on the way, they stumble upon a breathing pipe in the ground, which leads to a little girl buried in a tiny room underground. The five decide to help her, but the walk back to the nearest town is many miles, so they split up (a horror movie no-no), and Alison and the lead climber take a shortcut that involves some climbing (natch), in order to return to town more quickly so the police can be summoned; the other three take the girl by the less arduous route. Things go bad quickly when killers show up and start picking off the climbers one by one, and Alison decides to double back and find the others and warn them, only to find they are being hunted as well. There’s a little too much going on behind the scenes in this movie. When the killers and their motivations are revealed, the plot’s kind of smart, but in essence what’s happening here is the collision of two movies – one about mountain climbing and one about a kidnapping – and neither really has anything to do with the other. The first hour or so is all about the climbers, and then the last forty minutes we focus almost exclusively on various sets of killers trying to blow each other away and complete their kidnapping transaction. It’s as if Alison and the little girl wandered into a different film, and of course there has to be a weird festival with naked devil women and people spewing fire toward the end of the film, just to complicate things and even further confuse the viewer. What’s there is mildly enjoyable, and I never mind looking at Melissa George, but I gave up paying close attention when the plot started to bend toward the finale to services its own ends; they finally get to the village and find the police, which of course is staffed by one middle-aged cop who seems not to take them very seriously at all, even though they stumble into the station bleeding. All so that one of the hunters can fire at them under cover of fireworks, hitting the cop with no problem but somehow unable to even graze Alison or the kid. The only smile I got toward the end of the film was the appearance of Karel Roden, whom I recognized from Bourne Supremacy, Hellboy and Blade II, and who is good here, but sadly tangled up in the messy kidnapping plot. It’s not a terrible film, but it’s too complicated for its own good, and it probably should have been only about the kidnapping; we’re sold one movie about rock

climbers only to find ourselves knee-deep in Euro-crime. It’s lightly enjoyable if you’re not too demanding, but we’ve seen this sort of thing elsewhere, done far better. August 18, 2013

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