Blunted edge

It's strike two for Lee Tamahori with The Edge

by MATTHEW HAYS

It has been three years since Lee Tamahori's feature film debut, Once Were Warriors. This brutal film, New Zealand's most successful export to date, showed the effects of a merciless, macho patriarch on his Maori family. Frustrated by his minority status, Tamahori's lead character took his anger out on his wife and children.

Tamahori's third feature (his first since the dreadful Mulholland Falls) comes as a bit of a surprise. There's plenty of male posturing, some competition over a beautiful babe, conflicts surrounding survival amid nature's harshest elements--and not one iota of irony over any of it. No doubt the overall tone of the film has more to do with the screenwriter, David Mamet, who is known for his strong male characters on both screen and stage.

The film begins as intellectual billionaire Sir Anthony Hopkins leads an entourage up to a mountain retreat. His beautiful wife, Elle Macpherson, is a model who's doing an elaborate outdoor shoot with a fashion photographer, Alec Baldwin. On a small plane on an errand, Baldwin and Hopkins are shocked to find the plane descending, and finally crashing. They survive, only to be stalked by a bear out for a full-meal deal of human flesh. Amid all the drama, Hopkins must figure out: Is Baldwin out to kill Hopkins, in the hopes of marrying his babe-like wife and running off with all of his money, or is he just a rather shady and shallow photographer type (or both)?

The Edge feels like a film made in bits and pieces. Some pieces work, others don't. The conflict between Hopkins and Baldwin holds our interest for a while, and then along comes the bear. A few good thrills, but it's too obviously a larger device to make a point about the conflict between the two men. Most of the dialogue is laughable. Jerry Goldsmith, the composer who created such wondrous scores as Alien, Planet of the Apes and Basic Instinct, here bottoms out with a bit of sentimental bravado that doesn't fit the film's tone at all. And these add up to The Edge's principal problem--what few bits and pieces this film has don't fit together at all. Goldsmith is scoring for a Spielberg movie; Baldwin is acting for a Mamet movie; Hopkins is pontificating for an episode of Professor Kitzel; Mamet is writing dialogue for the TV-movie-of-the-week; Tamahori doesn't appear to know what he's doing; and the result is: Ernest Hemingway meets Walt Disney!

Opens Friday, Sept. 26