Final Ascent

This picture tells the story of a father and daughter trying to overcome the loss of a loved one. Without giving anything away, they need to work together to battle the bad guys. Mountain climbers will love this picture. It's full of interesting twists and turns and has some very good characters. Check it out on Fox Family or on video!

This is a seriously bad film. Everyone concerned must have worked very hard to make it this dreadful. It's a long time since I've seen actors perched on the top of a plastic rock in a studio trying frantically to convince us that they're on the top of a high mountain despite the cheap backdrop that tells us otherwise. The plot was horribly familiar, a group of crooks chasing the missing loot from the robbery that went wrong while a saintly father, who needed a good haircut, tried to save his one surviving daughter from the clutches of the desperados. His youngest daughter was killed falling three feet off the plastic rock right at the start of the film, which gave me the first good laugh of the evening. The actors had terrible dialogue, and did their best to match it with their acting efforts. What saved this dire movie was the fact that it was so unintentionally funny. Strong men were falling to their knees with altitude sickness as they strolled up a gentle slope that I could manage, and so could my old dog. Then, suddenly, they'd be scaling a mountain face with snow on the ground, only to emerge into a flat grassy space with no sign of the snow. A massive avalanche was avoided by one of the characters with a small jump to his left, but then it couldn't have been as bad as it looked because it didn't take a single bush or tree with it as it passed. The father and his daughter were meant to be keeping one step ahead of the gang of crooks at one stage, but ended up about two feet away from them, eyeballing the chief villain through a clump of grasses in a lake. Luckily they were able to duck beneath the water just as his beady eyes lighted on them, and despite some awe-inspiring double takes from the daughter's boyfriend, the villain decided he hadn't seen anything after all. I rather wish I hadn't.

Alright, the film is like "Cliffhanger" only no budget, but I like the bad guy getting altitude sickness, as one other reviewer wrote. It's fun to see him get progressively sicker but to keep climbing for the money. Some action at the end is so poorly directed that the young girl parachutes down and gets back up too quickly to save her dad. The casting on this film is weak with many of the secondary characters. I assume these were not "Hollywood" hires. Some clever dialogue, though. The pacing of the film seemed good. Heidi Noelle Lenhart comes across as quite likable. In fact, it was her that kept me watching. In the end, this could have been a better film with more money and better secondary actors.

Our family has experienced the loss of a loved one leaving a strained relationship between my daughter and my husband. I found the relationship between the father and daughter in "Final Ascent" to be so accurate that I was brought to tears. I enjoyed the plot and the action just fine, but the relationship between the father and daughter really rang true in a way that I haven't really seen since "Ordinary People." This film really moved me. Great family movie!

Okay, this is a low budget flick that wants to be big, but to its credit is a villain with foibles. When the baddie in this flick gets altitude sickness, it grounds this picture in reality and adds depth to the villain's character. When he keeps climbing because of his avarice...stopping at nothing to collect his money atop the mountain, we cannot help but delight in his worsening physical state. Heidi Noelle Lenhart is no Julia Roberts but is highly watchable nonetheless. Perhaps this script would have been better with more money behind it, since the characters and dialogue are quite good. Overall, this film kept me watching.