Cliff Notes

Gabe is a cliffhanger. He’s one of the best in the world. All of his friends are cliffhangers too. They love it more than anything—except each other. The movie Cliffhanger starts out with a majestic shot of a mountain chain hanging as long as the eye can see while an orchestra swells with the panoramic view. We see Gabe cliffhanging (of course!) 4,000 feet up in the air. Some of his cliffhanging friends wait at the top of a precipice to be rescued by Gabe. They are his friends Tucker and some girl that looks like Jennifer Grey but isn’t. A helicopter manned by Frank (more on him later) and Gabe’s main squeeze, Jessie, comes to pick them up. The only way the stranded cliffhangers can be rescued is to have them shimmy across a cable from the cliff they are on to the one Frank parked his chopper on.

Tucker gets across to the other side no problem. Jennifer Grey goes next, only to have her harness break. Then she drops the teddy bear she had in her backpack. This is not Jennifer Grey’s day. Gabe scurries out on the line to save her. He grabs her by the hand just in time. Things are going great until Jennifer Grey’s hand comes out of her glove and falls to her untimely death. Gabe couldn’t be more riddled with guilt. Tucker couldn’t be more upset at his friend for letting his best girl plummet to aforementioned death.



Flash forward eight months later when a U.S. mint in Denver needs to shuttle hundreds of thousand dollar bills across the United States. These guys are clearly not cliffhangers, because if they were, they would be cliffhanging right now and not wearing suits unsuitable for cliffhanging in. No, they are federal agents and government pencil pushers. Why are we bothering with them? This movie isn’t about money transfers. Well, it’s here that we learn transferring amounts of money this large by land or sea is dangerous because they can get hijacked, but no one can hijack a plane (uh…).

Cut to a scenic outdoor setting, where Gabe is driving a Jeep. He’s recognized by a group of bros who follow him. They see if he wants to go cliffhanging with them. He politely refuses, and hightails it to the home he and Jessie were starting together. Jessie is less than excited to see Gabe. He’s been gone for all of those eight months, unable to let go of the tragedy of letting go of Jennifer Grey. It racks his consciousness every waking minute. Then Jessie chastises him for running away from his problems. Gabe can’t catch a break.

Now, we find ourselves 16,000 feet in the air, way too high for anyone to be cliffhanging. So we must be, you guessed it, back in the company of the lame suits and government types. Nothing really happens here, except for a double crossing, some gunplay, an in-air transfer of a guy zip lining from one plane to another shot without any special effects, and one of the planes going up in a fiery inferno, so I’m going to skip over it. The thing you most need to remember is that three briefcases filled with millions of dollars land somewhere in the mountain chain beneath them. John Lithgow and his ragtag team of international thieves land their plane in search of the missing moneys.

Frank (I told you we’d return to him) is busy painting a picture of a monkey being eaten by a banana for Tucker and Jessie. He calls it “nature in reverse.” I call it a corn shit and a traditional shit smeared on a windowpane and passed as a painting. But that’s the beauty of Frank’s art—it’s open for interpretation.

Their humoring of Frank is interrupted by a very convincing distress call sent out by one of John Lithgow’s lackeys, Kristel (that’s her pilot name). With the weather picking up, they need the aid of Gabe to bring the stranded crew to safety. Tucker doesn’t want Gabe’s help. Gabe doesn’t want to help. Here, we find out he hasn’t cliffhanged in months. That’s almost an entire lifetime in cliffhanger years. But Gabe can’t help himself. Cliffhanging is in his blood. He wants, no, must, save the stranded passengers. You know he means business when he turns his hat around. It’s almost like he becomes a whole ‘nother man.

It doesn’t take long for Gabe to realize the stranded crew is actually a bunch of money hungry curmudgeons, and he has to use all of his cliffhanging abilities to save Tucker and the mountains from their clutches and thwart the baddies in a battle of wits. It’s about at this juncture that the film turns into an all-out action sequence with little of anything else. Sure, you get a glimpse of character development here and there (did you know the bros like MTV and air hockey?) and some spectacular death scenes (my favorite being when Gabe shoulder presses one of the bad guys over his head and drives a stalactite through his midsection), but I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details. You might say I'm ending the synopsis on a CLIFFHANGER!

That’s the surface of the movie. Let’s talk about the meat and potatoes, the heart of the film, if you will. This movie was released in 1993, back when the economy was booming and money was merely a symbol for material wealth whose monetary value was dictated by its demand—in other words, a simpler time. A time when Sylvester Stallone would team up with fellow Summer of Action alum, director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Driven) and make a film with a budget of $85 million (adjusting for inflation, that amount would be equivalent to approximately $785 billion today) and turn that initial investment into $255 million in global sales (approximately $97 trillion today). It’s like the two Hollywood behemoths looked longingly into each other’s eyes, saw that the world was run by corruption and greed, and said, “Hey yo! Let’s make a movie about the pitfalls and trappings of this capitalist venture.”

Hence, you have the government officials all concerned with their money and the hijackers that will risk life and limb to steal it from them. All of that jonesing for the almighty dollar leads to explosions, death, skiing, and excitement. Boring!

On the flipside, you have the cliffhangers that care only for cliffhanging. So long as there is a precipice to dig their toes into or a summit to scale, they are as happy, if not happier, than the corporate sellouts that chase the almighty dollar to no avail.

Heck, at one point, while Gabe and Jessie are stranded in the cold vacuum that is the mountainside, they use stacks of money to keep a fire roaring. It costs a fortune to heat this place, indeed. They could have pocketed some of it, took it home with them, set aside a rainy day fund for those lean cliffhanging years, but they don’t. It won’t bring them happiness. Only the burden of goods and services.

A toast to Cliffhanger. Were it not for your cautionary tale about chasing the emptiness of the almighty dollar and a generation of Americans not living within their means, we might not have been ready for the economic meltdown that faced us some fifteen years later. Bravo.